Take it easy Lynn.... The article was pretty light on information really and so it should be given the subject is fairly simple. Anyone who considers themselves a real game developer really should already know this sort of stuff.

As for Hijack, Mark is already doing this basically. There are a few wasted bits here and there and you might save a byte or two. I don't really think it would be worth the trouble myself. In most cases the bits are used very efficiently already. For example I used 8 bits for the left/right time alignment stuff. Out of the 256 combinations, I used 255. I only wasted 0.3% of the available information in 8 bits.