Abstract
Multimedia coding technology, after about 20 years of active research, has delivered a rich variety of different and complex coding algorithms. Selecting an appropriate subset of these algorithms would, in principle, enable a codec designer to produce any desired trade-off between compression performance and implementation complexity. Currently, interoperability demands that this selection process be “hard-wired” into the normative description of the codec, or at best, a number of choices codified within the media syntax (i.e MPEG profiles).