The present invention provides a system and method for explicitly transmitting a block attribute in the data of a block. In one embodiment, a current block of data is randomized in accordance with an ID value from the current block and from at least one temporally adjacent block of data. The ID of the current block is selected such that when combined with determined bits of the data results in the value of the block attribute. During a decoding process, the block attribute is retrieved by accessing the determined bits of the data. In one embodiment, the data is then decoded by generating possible candidate decodings and evaluating the candidate decodings based upon confidence metrics.