The use of a picture delimiter that is contained in a NAL unit type value that is reserved in the current AVC or SVC specification. The present invention provides the scalability information for the H.264/AVC base layer in such a manner that bitstreams remain decodable with H.264/AVC decoders. In addition, the picture delimiter of the present invention may contain many other syntax elements that can help in easier processing of bitstreams compared to the plain H.264/AVC bitstream syntax.