We propose a flow control method that controls the usage quantity of resources and the playing quality of received image streams in mobile video terminals in a wireless telecommunications environment. Our adaptive flow control (AFC) is able to dynamically select and execute the most suitable playing method among several methods that have mutually different playing qualities affected by frame jitter (i.e., the data arrival jitter for one frame), that use different amounts of resources, and that have different structures in their threads, in order to play video, e.g., real-time video conferencing.