According to some embodiments of the invention, a method of minimizing buffer requirements, in a packet based multimedia system having a multimedia source device coupled to a multimedia display device by way of a bi-directional auxiliary channel arranged to transfer information between the display device and the source device and vice versa and a unidirectional main link arranged to carry multimedia data packets from the multimedia source device to the multimedia display device is disclosed. Interspersing special characters that allow the display device to distinguish each bit of pixel data included in the data packets thereby requiring only a small FIFO type buffer unit.