ABSTRACT Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) has become a driving concept behind a significant amount of research activities. One of MPEG’s (Moving Pictures Experts Group) responses to UMA is MPEG-21 Digital Item Adaptation (DIA). In this paper we present how tools as specified within DIA (i.e., normative XML-based description formats) are applied in streaming and constrained environments enabling piece-wise multimedia content adaptation including the adaptation decisiontaking process and the actual resource adaptation in a coding format-independent way. Additionally, we demonstrate how the metadata overhead imposed by DIA tools can be reduced by means of appropriate metadata encoding tools.