Aspects of a method and system for redundancy-based decoding of video content in a wireless system are provided. A wireless receiver may determine whether a received multimedia data stream comprises video content and may select a redundancy-based decoder when video content is detected. The wireless receiver may be a wireless local area network (WLAN) receiver or a cellular receiver. Video content may be indicated by at least one flag in a preamble or a reserved field of the received multimedia data. The redundancy-based decoder may be a Viterbi decoder. The wireless receiver may enable a standard Viterbi decoder to decode portions of the multimedia data that do not comprise video content. The wireless receiver may generate at least one signal to select the redundancy-based decoder or the standard Viterbi decoder.