In real time applications, the low delay rate is an important requirement of video coding. We propose a simple low delay rate control method in this paper for such applications. In this method, target bits are divided into two parts: uncontrolled and controlled bits in the frame layer. The first part is assigned to the header, syntax and motion vectors according to that spent in the previous encoded frame. The second part is assigned to DCT coeffcients by employing a rate model for mactorblock Q P determination. Experiments show that the proposed method can achieve better performance compared with that of the test model TMN5 of H .263, and slightly worse performance, but with lower computation complexity, compared with that of the TMN8 of H.263+ . In this time, the low delay rate is an important requirement of video coding. We propose a simple low delay rate control method in this paper for such applications. In this method, the target bits are divided into two parts: uncontrolled and controlled bits in the first part is assigned to the header, syntax and motion vectors according to that spent in the previous encoded frame. The second part is assigned to DCT coeffcients by employing a rate model for mactorblock QP determination. method can achieve better performance compared with that of the test model TMN5 of H .263, and slightly worse performance, but with lower computation complexity, compared with that of the TMN8 of H.263 +.