Multi-media jitter removal in an asynchronous digital home network

A method and an apparatus using a system level clocking scheme to remove jitter from multi-media packets distributed over an asynchronous network, in particular an Ethernet network. The present invention overcomes the problems associated with jitter introduced in an Ethernet network by using various time stamps to synchronize a client device clock to a headend clock and to control the data flow in the client device to match the rate that the data is received by a broadband receiver coupled to the headend. A first time stamp is prepended to the transport packets when the packets are received from the headend. A second time stamp is placed in the data frame when the data frame is placed on the network. A third time stamp is placed in the data frame when the data frame is received from the network. The second and third time stamps are used for clock synchronization and the first time stamp is used for data flow control. According to the present invention, the time stamps are added at the physical layer so that the time stamps correspond to the actual time the data packets are placed onto and received from the asynchronous network.