File storage for scalable media

A system, comprising:

• means for arranging scalable media streams for computer storage according to relationships of a directed acyclic graph, wherein each node represents a scalable media steam and edges between nodes represent dependencies between the scalable media streams;
• means for sharing sub-trees of the directed acyclic graph among different parts of the tree to reduce data space, wherein the different parts of the tree represent differently scaled presentations of the media content;
• and
• means for selecting a node to provide one of the presentations to an application, wherein the presentation requested by the application has scalable properties including one of a frame rate, size, quality, color, frequency, channel, and/or view represented by the node and by additional nodes dependent on the node, wherein a sub-tree of nodes representing the presentation is selected by deriving a directed tree from the selected node to a base layer node to reconstruct the presentation.