Abstract: Embodiments of the present invention include systems and methods for load balancing audio/video streams to maximize the number of video frames that are actually rendered on a target device, thus giving the user of the target device a higher quality playback experience. Some embodiments are directed to transcoding an audio/video stream into a format that allows additional decoding time on a target device for more complex video sections of the stream. Additional decoding time is gained by duplicating lower complexity video frames in the video stream that precede the complex video sections and temporally expanding the audio stream by a small percentage around each of these load-balanced windows in the video stream. Other embodiments are directed to identifying the more complex video sections in real-time as the stream is being decoded on a target device, and temporally expanding the audio stream to allow more decoding time for these complex sections.