Multiprocessors on a chip are the reality of these days. Semiconductor industry has recognized this approach as the most efficient in order to exploit chip resources, but the success of this paradigm heavily relies on the efficiency and widespread diffusion of parallel software. Among the many techniques to express the parallelism of applications, this paper focuses on pipelining, a technique well suited to data-intensive multimedia applications. We introduce a prototyping platform (FPGA-based) and a methodology for these applications. Our platform consists of a mix of standard and custom heterogeneous cores. We discuss several case studies, analyzing the interaction of the architecture and applications and we show that multimedia and telecommunication applications with unbalanced pipeline stages can be easily deployed. Our framework eases the development cycle and enables the developers to focus directly on the problems posed by the programming model in the direction of the implementation of a production system.