High quality digital wireless networks and advances in multimedia compression schemes now permit the transmission of video streams over mobile networks. This opens up video communications to a new range of mobile users. We present our experiences of integrating very-low-bit-rate video encoding into a heterogeneous mobile environment as part of an ongoing project to provide multimedia support for the emergency services. This paper focuses on the features required to enable open working between a variety of applications, end-systems and networks and the performance of a very low bit rate encoder.