Enabling dynamic content adaptation in distributed multimedia systems

Distributed multimedia presentation mechanisms lending to self-content adaptation are required in order to support heterogeneous devices and to incorporate user preferences in the presentations prior to their play-out. In this paper, we propose a proxy-based architectural framework where several services are available for content adaptation as the content may have to be converted into several intermediate forms before being transformed into its final adapted form. We also propose a new graph-based content adaptation algorithm able to decide about the availability of the services on the basis of the length of the queue associated with each service. To avoid an inefficient use of the set of services, an adaptation tree is generated in our algorithm which helps to determine the best set of services to employ, in order to deliver the requested content effectively.