Patent ID: 8243816

Claim:
An entropy decoding method for video data related to a plurality of decoding trees, the method comprising: (a) storing a plurality of microcode groups corresponding to the plurality of decoding trees in a microcode storage system, wherein each of the microcode groups comprises a series of microcodes each corresponding to a most probable symbol (MPS), and each comprising a decoding instruction corresponding to either a decoding operation operable to acquire a result representing execution order of the microcodes or a value returning operation operable to return one decoding value according to the results of the decoding operations upon the microcodes; (b) loading one of the microcode groups corresponding to one of the decoding trees from the microcode storage system using a microcode loading circuit; (c) obtaining one microcode from the loaded microcode group using a microcode execution circuit; (d) retrieving video data corresponding to the obtained microcode from a data storage system using a data retrieval circuit; (e) executing an entropy decoding operation on the retrieved video data according to the obtained microcode so as to either acquire the result when the decoding instruction of the obtained microcode is the decoding operation or return the decoding value when the decoding instruction of the microcode is the value returning operation using the microcode execution circuit, and retrieving video data corresponding to a subsequent microcode according to the MPS of the obtained microcode if the decoding instruction of the microcode is the decoding operation using the data retrieval circuit synchronously; (f) determining if the MPS matches the result of the entropy decoding operation using the microcode execution circuit when the microcode execution circuit has accomplished the entropy decoding operation; and (g) repeating block (e) according to the subsequent microcode if the MPS matches the result.