1. A method for reducing a bit rate in a multimedia data stream, the method comprising: spatially filtering two consecutive frames of a first multimedia data stream; temporally filtering and combining the two consecutive frames to produce a pre-processed frame, encoding the pre-processed frame using a plurality of scalar quantization values to produce a plurality of encoded frames; and selecting one of the encoded frames to include in a second multimedia data stream, the selection based at least in part on the visual quality of the encoded frames.