A tile-based run-length compression and decompression system is described that reduces memory bandwidth when encoding media data to memory and decoding media data from memory. The described run-length compression system and techniques implement a series of processing steps followed by run-length encoding to compress one or more media frames into a plurality of compressed bits in the form of a run-length encoded bitstream. The described run-length decompression system and techniques implement run-length decoding followed by a series of processing steps to decompress a compressed run-length encoded bitstream into one or more media frames. In various implementations, processing steps applied by run-length compression and decompression systems include one or more of Differential Pulse Code Modulation steps, gray coding steps, bitplane decomposition steps, pixel assembly steps, bitstream extraction steps, or bitplane organization steps. The processing steps, run-length encoding, and run-length decoding techniques discussed herein increase system compression ratios and reduce memory bandwidth usage for a system implementing the techniques when reading media data from, or writing media data to, system memory.