A method and apparatus for the single input multiple output based media adaptation is disclosed. In one embodiment, such adaption is performed in two steps. On step 1, content correlation between different compression schemes is used to perform the inter-format adaptation of a stream of a compression format to an intermediate output stream of another compression scheme with the same quality level. On step 2, content correlation between different quality levels is used to perform the intra-format adaptation of the intermediate output stream to multiple output streams at different quality levels with the same compression format. In one embodiment, content correlation is used to limit the search for mode candidates when performing both steps.