Patent ID: 7302516

Claim:
A moving picture encoding apparatus comprising a plurality of processing units which operate in parallel, and a shared storage section which is commonly accessed by the plurality of processing units, wherein the shared storage section stores: moving picture data which is split in predetermined units for independently applying processes thereto; and with respect to each of the split units of moving picture data, data necessary for an encoding process and a progress of the encoding process, wherein each of the plurality of processing units comprises: next process selection means for, based on the progress of the encoding process as stored in the shared storage section, selecting one of the split units of moving picture data and a process to be next executed for the selected unit of moving picture data; and process execution means for executing the process selected by the next process selection means for the unit of moving picture data selected by the next process selection means, and wherein each of the plurality of processing units executes respective operations independently of one another.