A bitstream encoding or decoding job is broken up into a plurality of segments, each of which is independent from subsequent segments and corresponds to a respective fence identifier. The segments are individually processed and progress is indicated using the fence identifiers. In some cases, a first segment is encoded, transmitted, decoded, and processed before a second segment is encoded. As a result, in some cases, segment statuses are more easily tracked, hardware is used more efficiently, end-to-end processing time is reduced, and less communication network bandwidth is used.