Patent ID: 8218642

Claim:
A video stream encoding apparatus, including: a divider for dividing a frame in a video stream into a plurality of processing units, each processing unit including a plurality of macro-blocks; and an encoder for in parallel encoding the plurality of macro-blocks in each processing unit, wherein said encoder includes two groups of co-processors, the first group of co-processors performing at least one process of motion estimation, discrete cosine transformation, quantization, de-quantization and inverse discrete cosine transformation on respective macro-blocks in said processing unit in parallel, the second group of co-processors performing variable length coding on the respective macro-blocks processed in said first group of co-processors in parallel, wherein when the first group of co-processors processes respective macro-blocks in an n th processing unit, the second group of co-processors processes respective macro-blocks in an n-1 st processing unit, and quantization parameters used when the first group processes the respective macro-blocks in the n th processing unit are derived from an output of the variable length coding on the respective macro-blocks in an n-2 nd processing unit by the second group.