Patent ID: 7356189

Claim:
A moving image compression device, comprising: a hardware processing section which compresses moving image data by hardware; a data storage section which stores the moving image data processed by the hardware processing section; and a software processing section which compresses the moving image data from the data storage section by software, wherein the hardware processing section includes a plurality of processing sections which perform processing including a discrete cosine transform and subsequent quantization of the moving image data; and wherein the software processing section performs variable-length coding of the moving image data quantized by the hardware processing section, the hardware processing section includes a data compression section which compresses the moving image data to be stored in the data storage section, the data storage section includes a plurality of types of packets each of which has a predetermined number of bits, the packets being identified by a higher-order bit, and the data compression section selectively uses the packets depending on whether the packets store compressed data or uncompressed data.