Video streaming is becoming one of the potential killer applications in a mobile service network. MPEG-4 fine-granularity scalability is proposed to significantly increase the flexibility for video transmission. However, the bottleneck of bandwidth often occurs in the last-mile transmission from the base station to the mobile device, which incurs quality degradation. Adaptive media playout (AMP) is a receiver-based technique that could eliminate the buffer outage and hence improve the associated visual quality. This paper addresses the issue of AMP control utilized in a mobile cellular environment. Specifically, we propose a novel AMP control that could further improve the visual quality compared to other conventional AMP controls. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed control provides better visual quality with a low complexity.