Systems and methods for layering a graphics plane on top of a compressed video signal are disclosed herein. A processed video stream is received from a video processing path, wherein the processed video stream comprises a stream of video macroblocks. A graphics plane is received from a graphics processing path, wherein the graphics plane comprises a set of graphics macroblocks. The graphics plane is layered on top of the processed video stream to generate an output video stream. Layering comprises blending a video macroblock from the stream of video macroblocks with a graphics macroblock from the set of graphics macroblocks. By layering one macroblock at time, graphics overlay can occur in real time or faster than real time as the compressed input stream is received.