A method and system for staggered parallelized video decoding system decodes a compressed video stream at approximately double the performance of conventional systems, and outputs the decoded stream to a video display device. Even and odd video frames from the video stream are identified and stored in a memory. A first decoder processes a first portion of a first even frame from among the stored even frames. After the first decoder completes processing the first portion of the first even frame, a second decoder begins processing a first odd frame from among the stored odd frames. The processing start times of the odd frames are staggered with respect to the even frames and vice versa, and the even and odd frames are simultaneously processed using first and second decoders.