Multimedia applications quickly emerge on various portable devices.These applications typically have a number of stringent requirements.They need a high amount of computational power together with real-timeperformance. They also must be reconfigurable, i.e., the applicationor the characteristics of the application can be modified at will. Byusing an FPGA to implement the performance critical parts of anapplication we can achieve both the performance and the flexibilitythat is needed for multimedia applications. As a proof of concept,our group is designing a scalable wavelet video decoder. Throughanalytical means we investigate whether an FPGA implementation of thiscodec can be used to reach the performance goals and what the resourcerequirements are. We find that modern FPGAs offer enoughcomputational power to obtain real-time performance of the decoder,but that the necessary memory bandwidth will be a challenge for thisdesign.