The invention provides a system and method allowing the adaptation of a nonadaptive system for playing/browsing coded audiovisual objects, such as the parametric system of MPEG-4. The system of the invention is referred to as the programmatic system, and incorporates adaptivity on top of the parametric system. The parametric system of MPEG-4 consists of a Systems Demultiplex (Demux) overseen by digital media integration framework (DMIF), scene graph and media decoders, buffers, compositer and renderer. Adaptations possible with the invention include interfaces in the categories of media decoding, user functionalities and authoring, thus allowing a number of enhanced functionalities in response to use input as well as graceful degradation in response to limited system resources. The invention includes a specification of an interfacing method in the form of an application programming interface (API). Hot object, directional, trick mode, transparency and other interfaces are specified.