Some embodiments facilitate encoding/decoding of a frame by organizing frame data in a storage structure in a novel manner. Specifically, in a portion of the storage structure allocated for a frame slice, used partition entries are stored in a first section of the allocated portion and unused partition entries are stored in a second section of the allocated portion, the first and second sections each comprising a continuous area of storage in the storage structure so that used partition entries are not interspersed with nonused partition entries. In some embodiments, additional data useful in the encoding or decoding of video data is determined and stored into the unused bytes of used partition entries (such as macroblock header data or canonical reference frame index data). In some embodiments, two or more identical partitions of a macroblock are coalesced into a single partition.