Patent ID: 8179974

Claim:
A computing device comprising a processing unit, memory and storage media storing computer-executable instructions which, when executed, cause the computing device to perform a method of encoding video, the method comprising: selecting one of a plurality of scan orders; outputting information indicating the selected scan order in a bit stream; applying the selected scan order to reorder plural frequency coefficients of a block; entropy coding the reordered plural frequency coefficients using a multi-level nested-set representation of the reordered plural frequency coefficients, including: representing a first set of one or more of the reordered plural frequency coefficients as a summary representation with a first symbol at a first level of the multi-level nested-set representation; entropy coding the first symbol and a second symbol at the first level of the multi-level nested-set representation; and at a given level of the multi-level nested set representation that is lower than the first level: encoding plural symbols at the given level, each of the plural symbols at the given level representing a set of one or more of the reordered plural frequency coefficients; and for each of the plural symbols at the given level, determining whether to split the set for the symbol into plural subsets and, if so, encoding plural sub-symbols at a lower level of the multi-level nested-set representation, each of the plural sub-symbols at the lower level representing one of the plural subsets; and outputting the entropy coded frequency coefficients in the bit stream.