Moving picture experts group (MPEG) standards provide tools for a broad range of purposes, covering from coding to metadata description tools. In this paper, the combined use of tools from different MPEG standards is described in the context of a video summarization application. The main objective of the framework is the efficient generation of summaries, integrated with their adaptation to the user's terminal and network. The MPEG-4 Scalable Video Coding specification is used for fast adaptation and summary bitstream generation. MPEG-21 digital item adaptation tools are used to describe metadata related to the user's terminal and network. MPEG-7 tools are used to describe the summary. Finally, the framework is compared with alternative approaches (variations and transcoding), in terms of efficiency, rate-distortion performance and other aspects. Downloaded from FIGURE 7. Low-level extraction process: (a) IDR AUs (no header update) and (b) I AUs (header update).