A system and method are disclosed for parallel compression and
decompression of a bitstream. For compression, the bitstream is separated
into a plurality of components, and the components are encoded using a
compression algorithm. Packets are then constructed from the encoded
components. At least one packet is associated with each encoded component
and comprises header information and encoded data. The packets are
combined into a packetized encoded bitstream. For decompression, the
packets are separated from the packetized encoded bitstream using the
header information. The packets are then decoded in parallel using a
decompression algorithm to recover the encoded data. The plurality of
components are reconstructed from the recovered encoded data and combined
to recover the bitstream.
