The evolution of digital video technology and the continuous improvements in
communication infrastructure is propelling a great number of interactive multimedia
applications, such as real-time video conference, web video streaming and mobile TV, among
others. The new possibilities on interactive video usage have created an exigent market of
consumers, which demands the best video quality wherever they are and whatever their
network support is (Schwarz et al., 2006). On this purpose, the transmitted video must match
the receiver’s characteristics such as the required bit rate, resolution and frame rate, thus
aiming to provide the best quality subject to receiver’s and network’s limitations. Besides, the
same link is often used to transmit to either restricted devices such as small cell phones, or to
high-performance equipments, e.g. HDTV workstations. In addition, the stream should adapt
to wireless lossy networks (Ohm, 2005). Based on this reasoning, these heterogeneous and
non-deterministic networks represent a great problem for traditional video encoders which
do not allow for on-the-fly video streaming adaptation.