Alembik - A framework for the adaptive transcoding of multimedia content in mobile environments: From requirements to architecture and performance evaluation

Nowadays, mobile devices have an increasing role in the generation and visualization of multimedia content. The issues raised by the management of multimedia content in mobile environments are mostly due to the variety of available devices, their limitations in front of the traditional ones, the network characteristics, the variety of the multimedia content types and formats, as well as to the lack of common standards related to the provisioning of services. In this context, Alembik aims to address these limitations and to provide a framework to transcode and adapt the multimedia content at runtime to the properties of the requiring mobile device. The main keywords which characterize Alembik are: dynamicity, flexibility, extensibility, standardization, user transparency, platform independence, high performance, and open source. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.