1. Method for encoding video data, the video data being structured into groups of frames, wherein the frames within a group have an initial sequential order and initial sequence numbers (1,. .. , 16), and wherein motion compensated temporal filtering of frames is used on a plurality of temporal decomposition levels, including the generation of motion vectors, the method comprising adaptive frame ordering including the steps of permuting K frames, K being a number lower or equal to the number of frames of the GOP; performing a motion estimation on successive subsets of the permuted frames, wherein for each subset a local criterion value is calculated, the local criterion value being a measure for the similarity between the frames in the subset, and storing the local criterion value; computing for the current permutation a global criterion value from said stored local criterion values, wherein the global criterion value is a measure for the coding cost resulting from the current permutation of the frames, the coding cost being the amount of bits used for encoding; storing the global criterion value of the current permutation and an identifier associated with the current permutation; repeating for a plurality of, or all possible, frame order permutations said steps of permuting K frames, performing motion estimation on subsets of the permuted frames, wherein said local criterion values are calculated, computing a global criterion value and storing the global criterion value associated with an identifier for the respective permutation; choosing from the processed permutations the one with the lowest coding cost as the initial order of the frames; and filtering the frames of the first temporal level in the chosen sequential order of frames.