Dynamic adaptation of multimedia data for mobile applications

The current explosive expansion of mobile communication systems will lead to an increased demand for multimedia applications. However, due to the large variety of mobile terminals (such as mobile phones, laptops...) and, because of this, a wide collection of different terminal possibilities and terminal characteristics, it is difficult to create a mobile multimedia application which can be used on mobile devices of different types. In this paper, we propose a mobile multimedia application that adapts its content to the possibilities of the mobile terminal and to the end-user preferences. Also the application takes changing device characteristics into account. To make this possible, a software framework is set up to enable negotiation between the mobile terminal and the content server. During the initial negotiation, the concept of the Universal Multimedia Access framework is used. Subsequent negotiations take place after changing terminal characteristics or end-user preferences, and this by means of time-dependent metadata. This newly created flexible and extendable framework makes it possible that multimedia applications interact with the content provider in order to deliver an optimal multimedia presentation for any arbitrary mobile terminal at any given time.