the output of the ts encoder it will be compliant at the input to the ts decoder thus buffer violations will not be an issue under certain circumstances some drawbacks of this embodiment can be that the dented ip packet may also contain intermingled null systems and or audio packets these packets will also be lost however lost null packets are of no consequence as they contain no useful data u2014 they simply pad the bitstream to maintain or increase the mpeg 2 ts bit rate similarly lost systems data is of no consequence since the systems data pat pmt and possible application specific system information tables is repeated on a regular basis the decoder can simply use the most recent copy it has saved in memory however lost audio packets will cause the audio decoding subsystem to perform some error concealment e g muting unless other means are incorporated to protect the audio stream the audio quality of service can potentially suffer with this method align ip headers to video frame boundaries and move any audio packets outside as shown in fig5 in addition to steps described above with respect to fig3 a and 3 b it can be determined if an audio packet lies within a video frame boundary 502 and the sending of the audio frame can be delayed until the current video frame has been sent 504 in this embodiment the mpeg 2 ts is slightly modified by ensuring that audio packets lie between video frame boundaries or at least do not lie within low priority video.