Supporting Video in Heterogeneous Mobile Environments

High quality digital wireless networks and advances in multimedia compression schemes now permit the transmission of video streams over mobile networks. This opens up video communications to a new range of mobile users. We present our experiences of integrating very-low-bit-rate video encoding into a heterogeneous mobile environment as part of an ongoing project to provide multimedia support for the emergency services. This paper focuses on the features required to enable open working between a variety of applications, end-systems and networks and the performance of a very low bit rate encoder. 1