this paper addresses the issue of robust transmission of sources encoded with Variable Length Codes (VLCs) over error-prone channels. This paper describes bitstream construction methods offering different trade-offs of error-resilience, progressivity and flexibility. In contrast with related algorithms described in the literature, all the proposed methods have a linear complexity as the sequence length increases. The applicability of soft-input soft-output (SISO) and turbo decoding principles to resulting bitstream structures is investigated. In addition to error-resilience, the amenability of the bitstream construction methods to progressive decoding is considered. The VLC code has to be designed so that the symbol energy is mainly concentrated on the first bits of the symbol representation (i.e. on the first transitions of the corresponding codetree). Simulation results reveal high performances in terms of symbol error rate (SER) and mean square reconstruction error (MSE). These error-resilience and progressivity properties can be obtained without any penalty in compression efficiency.