With the proliferation of networked devices, today's multimedia applications operate, as never before, in heterogeneous and dynamic environments. An attractive way to deal with this situation is to make applications self-adaptive (or self-reconfigurable); that is, make them able to observe them-selves and their environment, to detect significant changes and to reconfigure their own behavior in QoS-specific ways. This issue has made the subject of numerous works, especially in the context of multimedia applications. However, several key requirements of adaptivity have not been well addressed such as: the generality to a wide range of applications, the customizability to each application context and the flexibility of reconfiguration mechanisms. We address these aspects in a component-based framework for building self-reconfigurable multimedia applications, named PLASMA. This paper describes the architecture of PLASMA and shows its use through an application use case. Experimental evaluations show that reconfigurations have a low cost, while significantly improving the QoS.