Patent ID: 7961786

Claim:
In a computing device that implements a video decoder, a method of decoding video comprising: receiving, at the video decoder, a first code from a bit stream, wherein the first code indicates a frame coding mode of a video frame, and wherein the first code indicates that the frame coding mode for the video frame is field-coded interlaced; receiving, at the video decoder, a second code from the bit stream for the field-coded interlaced video frame, wherein the field-coded interlaced video frame has two fields arranged in the bit stream for decoding as individual fields; and with the video decoder, decoding the second code, wherein the second code represents information that jointly indicates two separate field types for the two fields, respectively, and an order for the two separate field types for the two fields, and wherein each of the two separate field types is capable of being any of an intra-coded field (I), a predictive-coded field (P), a bi-directionally predictive-coded field (B), and a bi-directionally predictive-coded field with only intra-coded macroblocks (BI); wherein the decoding the second code comprises looking up the second code in a table that maps different second code values to different combinations of the two separate field types.