1. A method for encoding a plurality of audiovisual objects into a compressed coded representation suitable for computational graceful degradation at the decoder comprising: encoding said audiovisual objects, incorporation methods allowing computational graceful degradation to be employed in the decoder, into their coded representations; estimating the implementation independent computational complexity measures in terms of a plurality of block decoding parameters; partitioning said coded representations of the audiovisual objects into a plurality of access units and adding header information to form packets; inserting a descriptor containing said block decoding parameters into the header of the packet; and multiplexing these packets to form a single multiplexed bitstream.