Multimedia streams impose tight temporal constraints since different kinds of continuous multimedia streams have to be played synchronously. We devise in this paper an adaptive transmission scheme to ensure the continuous and synchronous playback of audio and video streams based on Real-time Transport Protocol. Realization of our adaptive scheme is composed of a series of operations in three stages, namely, (1) dynamic reordering mechanism, (2) decoding-recovery mechanism, and (3) adaptive synchronization mechanism. An empirical study is conducted to provide insights into our adaptive transmission scheme. As validated by our simulation results, the adaptive transmission mechanism is able to strike a good balance of both stable playback and the end-to-end delay reduction. Furthermore, we analyze the jitter resistance, the end-to-end delay, and the buffer size required in order to enhance the applicability of this scheme to more applications that require the transmission of multimedia data.