Bink Video organises frame data somewhat on per-row basis and separated into individual streams. That means that data is sent in portions in interleaved fashion: first it is block types, then it’s colour values for e.g. fill or pattern blocks, then it’s motion values and so on. Before each row decoding can start, decoder should check if it still has some data from that stream or read more. For example, in the beginning you may get just enough block types transmitted for one row, zero motion vectors and one DC value for a block somewhere in the middle of the stream; so for the second row you refill only block types, and DC values stream will be queried only after that single value in it has been used.
And to complicate the things further, there may be yet another kind of data stored in-between: RLE block information (scan index, copy/run bit and run lengths), DCT coefficients and lossless residue data.
It’s also worth noting that while version 'b' simply stored stream data in fixed-length bit-fields, the latter versions employed static codebooks to improve compression.
Anyway, how to write such streams correctly? My original encoder supported only several block types and was able to bundle all stream data together to transmit it once for the whole plane. But since I wanted to support all possible block types, I had to devise more flexible system. So I ended up with a structure that holds all data in per-row entries so when the plane data is gathered I can easily decide how many rows of data to send and when more data needs to be sent. Additional bitstream data is also stored there (in form of (code, length) pairs) and can be written for each row that has it.
Beside that I’ve introduced a structure to all stream data for one block. This makes it easy to calculate how many bits will be used to code it, output the data (just append its contents to the corresponding entries in the plane data) and even reconstruct the block from it (except for DCT-based ones). Actually I use three instances of it (one for the best block coding candidate, one for the current block coding and one for trying block coding variants if the mode permits it) but that’s a minor detail.
In either case, even if this approach to coding is not unique (TrueMotion codecs employed it as well, to give one example), it’s distinct enough from the other variants I’ve seen and was still quite fun to implement.