A moving picture coding apparatus is provided, which controls coding of a following stream, according to virtual buffer occupancy determined by a generated amount of coded data and an amount of coded data transferred to an output destination, when generating the following stream, such that a preceding stream and the following stream, which both have an image stream multiplexed with other information, are reproduced seamlessly. The moving picture coding apparatus generates the preceding stream and the following stream by multiplexing the image stream and the other information to form the preceding stream and the following stream, and determines an initial value of the virtual buffer occupancy for the following stream according to an amount of delay resulting from the multiplexing, and the virtual buffer occupancy at an end of the preceding stream.