A method for indexing minimum coded units in a Joint Photographic Expert Group bit stream includes entropy decoding a first MCU to determine a bit offset of a second MCU and a DC coefficient of the first MCU, wherein the first MCU immediately precedes the second MCU in the bit stream, and indexing the second MCU by storing the bit offset and the DC coefficient in an index. The packet processing pipeline tracks the usage of lookup resources by each of the multiple packet sources. The length L and the gap G are governed by a relationship L+G\u2267\u03bb.