Issues in multimedia scaling: the MPEG video streams case

Multimedia streams usually have an inherent hierarchy and an inter-independency of subsequent blocks in their data structures. Dealing with these features within the operating system and the network brings a global resource usage improvement. We propose a new method for media scaling based on two complementary techniques: circular buffers and filtering. We describe an MPEG distributed application architecture built with the two combined techniques and show improvements in the received video quality.