Patent ID: 7379607

Claim:
In a computer system, a method of processing plural video pictures of a video sequence, the plural video pictures including one or more predicted video pictures, wherein each of the one or more predicted video pictures includes plural macroblocks, the method comprising: for one or more skipped macroblocks among the plural macroblocks of at least one of the one or more predicted video pictures, decoding skipped macroblock information at a layer higher than macroblock layer in bitstream syntax for the video sequence, the skipped macroblock information having been encoded according to a coding mode selected from among plural available coding modes; processing the one or more skipped macroblocks among the plural macroblocks of at least one of the one or more predicted video pictures, wherein each of the at least one of the one or more predicted video pictures is predicted from no more than one reference video picture, wherein each of the one or more skipped macroblocks uses predicted motion for the skipped macroblock based upon motion of one or more other macroblocks, and wherein each of the one or more skipped macroblocks lacks residual information; and outputting a result of the processing.