# Latency of Compressed Streams It is very important that you look very closely at your streams and ensure that they are configured for low latency decoding which is non-trivial and many "off the shelf" H.264 and HEVC encoders do not provide without changing their settings. If an encoder has a low latency mode, then this is often a very good starting point. Other areas to look at are ensuring that you are using only I and P frames so that each incoming frame can be immediately decoded without a delay. In addition, it is very common that different codecs place "video delay" settings in the SPS NAL or SEI NAL units in the stream that instruct a decoder to delay the display of frames which introduces latency. In our experience, almost no HX implementation has been correctly configured for lowest latency use by default and work has always been needed to optimize the stream settings. We have tools that can help measure the decode latency imposed by the stream if you wish. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.ndi.video/all/developing-with-ndi/advanced-sdk/using-h.264-h.265-and-aac-codecs/latency-of-compressed-streams.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.