On the Design of a Transcoding Component for a Dynamic Adaptation of Multimedia Resources

Nowadays we face the need to serve users who adopt multiple and different devices in various locations. This environment is implicitly heterogeneous and poses new challenges on how the information and the services of interest are given to the users. To cope with this problem the common approaches identify a limited number of device classes, based on the level of computational power and memory resources. Following this approach, modern organizations usually develop different contents separately, for what, at the very end, is the same information or service. Novel middleware components should provide content adaptation at finer-grained levels so that users may be able to access information and services using any device, from anywhere, at anytime. Proper abstraction of the multimedia resources is needed in order to transform the contents suitably and provide different presentations to the users. Apart from the heterogeneity in devices, the proposals should also take into account the preferences and requirements of the users, including their capabilities. In this paper we claim that a unified approach for the adaptation of multimedia resources has to consider all the different prospected aspects and the dynamic nature of the context. We therefore present the design of a resulting Transcoding Component and its first implementation prototype.