A moving picture compression apparatus, comprising: a tile image sequence generation section configured to divide frames, from a frame sequence which comprises moving picture data, into a predetermined size to generate a tile image sequence; a reference image compression section configured to divide, by space-time division according to a selected redundancy pattern (S32a, S32b), the tile image sequence into data blocks, and further space-time divide the data blocks according to a selected division pattern (A, B, C, D) for quantization to generate compression data (304a, 304b, 304c, 304d, 306a, 306b, 308) of a reference image in storage units having one of a plurality of space-time compression patterns, representative of a combination of a selected redundancy pattern and a selected division pattern; a difference image generation section configured to generate a difference image sequence comprising difference images which each represent a difference between a respective tile image and an image obtained by decoding the compression data of the reference image generated by the reference image compression section and corresponding to the respective tile image; a difference image compression section configured to compress the difference image sequence to generate compression data of the difference images; and a compression data generation section configured to generate moving picture compression data including the compression data of the reference image and the compression data of the difference images and output the moving picture compression data to a storage apparatus; and wherein in the compression data of a reference image, the storage units each comprise luminance image data in four pallets and four indexes, wherein each pallet and each index is generated in accordance with the texture compression method of S3TC Texture Compression; each pallet comprising two representative values (P0, P1) of luminance; and each index designating one of the two representative values and a plurality of intermediate values (300, 302) obtained by linear interpolation of the representative values as a pixel value; and characterized in that the space-time compression pattern of a respective storage unit is identified by four bits; and wherein in each of the four pallets of the luminance image data, the storage order of the two representative values (P0, P1) is used to represent a binary one or zero by storing the two representative values in a first magnitude order to represent one, and a second magnitude order to represent zero, thereby providing the four bit identification of the space-time compression pattern of the storage unit. a tile image sequence generation section configured to divide frames, from a frame sequence which comprises moving picture data, into a predetermined size to generate a tile image sequence; a reference image compression section configured to divide, by space-time division according to a selected redundancy pattern (S32a, S32b), the tile image sequence into data blocks, and further space-time divide the data blocks according to a selected division pattern (A, B, C, D) for quantization to generate compression data (304a, 304b, 304c, 304d, 306a, 306b, 308) of a reference image in storage units having one of a plurality of space-time compression patterns, representative of a combination of a selected redundancy pattern and a selected division pattern; a difference image generation section configured to generate a difference image sequence comprising difference images which each represent a difference between a respective tile image and an image obtained by decoding the compression data of the reference image generated by the reference image compression section and corresponding to the respective tile image; a difference image compression section configured to compress the difference image sequence to generate compression data of the difference images; and a compression data generation section configured to generate moving picture compression data including the compression data of the reference image and the compression data of the difference images and output the moving picture compression data to a storage apparatus; and wherein in the compression data of a reference image, the storage units each comprise luminance image data in four pallets and four indexes, wherein each pallet and each index is generated in accordance with the texture compression method of S3TC Texture Compression; each pallet comprising two representative values (P0, P1) of luminance; and each index designating one of the two representative values and a plurality of intermediate values (300, 302) obtained by linear interpolation of the representative values as a pixel value; and characterized in that the space-time compression pattern of a respective storage unit is identified by four bits; and wherein in each of the four pallets of the luminance image data, the storage order of the two representative values (P0, P1) is used to represent a binary one or zero by storing the two representative values in a first magnitude order to represent one, and a second magnitude order to represent zero, thereby providing the four bit identification of the space-time compression pattern of the storage unit.