A novel system multiplexing and program component identification scheme is proposed, which has been adopted by AVS standard working group. Multiplexer periodically inserts program element information table (PEIT) describing ordering information of transport packets of program elements contained within transport stream. Demultiplexer extracts PEIT transport packets by a unique PEIT indicator and parses PEIT. With the position and count information recovered from PEIT, transport packets containing program specific information and elementary streams are identified, de-multiplexed and sent to matched decoders for further processing. To improve system error resilience, Packet Link Table (PLT) is introduced.