Patent ID: 7848407

Claim:
A method of processing H.264 compliant data comprising: allocating a plurality of regions in a memory internal to an H.264 compliant syntax parser circuit for concurrent storage of a plurality of slice headers associated with respective H.264 slice data to be processed, the method further comprising: transferring a plurality of parameter sets associated with the plurality of slice headers from an external memory to the internal memory; wherein transferring comprises: transferring a plurality of first parameter sets to a first allocated region of the internal memory responsive to parsing a first slice header that references the first parameter set; transferring a plurality of second parameter sets to a second allocated region of the internal memory responsive to parsing a second slice header that references the second parameter set; wherein the plurality of first parameter sets includes a first H.264 compliant Picture Parameter Set (PPS) and a first H.264 compliant Sequence Parameter Set (SPS) and the plurality of second parameter sets comprises a second H.264 compliant PPS and a second H.264 compliant SPS; applying the first PPS and the first SPS to a first stage of a video processing pipeline to provide processing of a first slice associated with a first one of the plurality of slice headers; wherein the first stage provides an output based on the processing of the first slice, the method further comprising: applying the second PPS and the second SPS to the first stage to provide processing of a second slice associated with a second one of the plurality of slice headers; and concurrently applying the first PPS and the first SPS to a second stage of the video processing pipeline to provide processing of the output from the first stage.