Question about RLE acceleration and SDL_Surface

Hi I was wondering if anyone can explain to me what is going on in an SDL
surface when it is converted to RLE? Does the pixels data member hold the
original uncompressed image and the map member store the compressed data? If
this is the case isn’t it wasteful to store identical data? I’m interested
in this becase the load times of my animation sets are really slow as it
doesn’t store the data as RLE.

I was going to save the data in the map member and then load copy this
compressed data to an SDL surface when I have to draw it._________________________________________________________________
MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos:
http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx