In this paper, we present Orcc 1 , an open-source development environment that aims at enhancing multimedia development by offering all the advantages of dataflow programming: flexibility, portability and scalability. To do so, Orcc embeds two rich eclipse-based editors that provide an easy writing of dataflow applications, a simulator that allows quick validation of the written code, and a multi-target compiler that is able to translate any dataflow program, written in the RVC-CAL language, into an equivalent description in both hardware and software languages. Orcc has already been used to successfully write tens of multimedia applications, such as a video decoder supporting the new High Efficiency Video Coding standard, that clearly demonstrates the ability of the environment to develop complex applications. Moreover, results show scalable performances on multi-core platforms and achieve real-time decoding frame-rate on HD sequences.