This disclosure describes techniques to improve a user experience in a Wireless Display (WD) system. The WD system includes a source device that provides media data to one or more sink devices. The techniques are directed toward reducing end-to-end latency in the WD system while improving video playback quality at the sink devices. More specifically, the techniques include customized playback at the sink devices based on the type of media data received from the source device. If the media data only includes video data and does not include audio data, a processing pipeline of the sink device is configured to render the video data without waiting to synchronize with non-existent audio data. If the media data includes both video data and audio data, an audio rendering start-up timer is reduced and the processing pipeline renders synchronized audio and video data according to the reduced start-up timer.