A system and method for decoding a signal comprising fixed-length data (FL-data) and variable length data (VL-data) is disclosed. In one embodiment, groups of fixed length data (FL-data) and blocks of variable length data (VL-data) are stored in a predetermined space. Each group of FL-data corresponds to a block of VL-data. The blocks of VL-data are retrieved by referencing corresponding groups of FL-data. In one embodiment, this system and method permits bidirectional recovery of data. In one embodiment, this is used in the transmission of video signals over a potentially lossy communications channel.