Single instances of individual codecs are instantiated on different processing elements, and blocks of video frames are interspersed or ‘striped’ across the multiple instances. An apparatus according to the invention comprises a demultiplexer for receiving the incoming uncompressed video stream and parsing it into blocks, each containing an integer multiple of the inter-frame coding distance, and each block is alternately sent to a different processing element for compression. This allows the output compressed signal to be generated in real-time without dropping frames.