the invention disclosed here is a method for an encoder to encode audiovisual information for transmission to the decoder without any prior knowledge of the computational capabilities of the decoder . a descriptor containing parameters that can be used to estimate the complexity of the decoding process is embedded in the system stream . the encoder also encodes the video information in such a manner that the decoder can choose to ignore some of the information and only decode a subset of the encoded information in order to reduce the computational requirements . this method allows more than one decoder to decode the same bitstream giving different resolutions depending on the computational capability of the decoder .