Abstract: The invention relates to a method and a compression device for compressing a data stream from a source to at least one sink in which at least one first bandwidth and one second bandwidth of a network, which is available to the source for transmitting the data stream to the at least one sink, is determined. The data stream may be is compressed to a first compressed data stream using at least one first compression rate, and to a second compressed data stream using a second compression rate. The first compression rate may be optimized for transmission using the first bandwidth, while the second compression rate may be optimized for transmission using the second bandwidth. The first compressed data stream and the second compressed data stream may then be providing for transmission at the same time.

Abstract: For transmitting multimedia data to a plurality of clients over a network, wherein the multimedia data is stored in a plurality of formats of different multimedia rates, on the basis of utility information for the multimedia data, the utility information describing a relationship between multimedia quality and multimedia rate, and on the basis of a condition of the network, for each of the plurality of clients available multimedia rates for the multimedia data are determined. In response to a client request for transmitting the multimedia data with a desired multimedia rate, in accordance with the available multimedia rates determined for the requesting client, a format of the requested multimedia data is selected and the multimedia data is transmitted in the selected format to the requesting client.