A method and apparatus are described for flow control for digital signal processing to support data stream operations. According to an embodiment of the invention, a method comprises setting a buffer number to an initial value; receiving a first data packet for processing during a first part of a first time frame, the data packet having a first data size; increasing the buffer number by an amount of data that can be passed to a coder; comparing the buffer number to a minimum amount of data for the coder; and setting a second data size to be received based on the comparison between the buffer number and the minimum amount of data for the coder.