At least a method and an apparatus are provided for efficiently encoding or decoding a video frame, and more particularly, to a method or an apparatus for efficiently providing an improved slice based pipelined coding/decoding with low latency. In particular, each video frame of a sequence of video frames are segmented into equal number of slices, with only one slice per video frame. In addition, the position of the only I slice changes sequentially for the each video frame of the sequence of video frames over time, forming a sawtooth pattern.