A communication system, network interface, and communication port is provided for interconnecting a network of multimedia devices. The multimedia devices can send streaming and/or non-streaming data across the network. The network accommodates all such types of data and assigns data types to time slots or frame segments within each frame to ensure streaming data maintains its temporal relationship at the receiver consistent with the transmitter. A coding violation within a frame segment of one or more frames is used to indicate the absence of isochronous streaming data within the byte locations containing the coding violations. Coding violations can, therefore, be interspersed between isochronous data messages or data transfers to note that a particular portion of a frame segment does not contain isochronous data.