A video coding mechanism is disclosed. The mechanism includes encoding a bitstream comprising one or more layers. A scalable nesting supplemental enhancement information (SEI) message is encoded into the bitstream in a current SEI network abstraction layer (NAL) unit. The scalable nesting SEI message contains one or more scalable-nested SEI messages and one or more scalable nesting layer identifiers (Ids) that specify layer Id values of the layers to which the scalable-nested SEI messages apply except a layer Id value of the current SEI NAL unit. A set of bitstream conformance tests are performed on the layers based on the scalable-nested SEI messages. The bitstream is stored for communication toward a decoder.