A real-time frame-layer rate control algorithm with a token bucket traffic shaper is proposed for distortion variation minimization. The proposed rate control method uses a non-iterative optimization method for low computational complexity, and performs bit allocation at the frame level to minimize the average distortion over an entire sequence as well as variations in distortion between frames. The proposed algorithm does not produce time delay from encoding, and is suitable for real-time low-complexity video encoder. Experimental results indicate that the proposed control method provides better visual and PSNR performances than the existing rate control method.