Apparatus and method for inter and intra mode selection and block partitioning

A hardware video encoder, comprising:

• an intra search block operating on a source picture to produce intra search block output including pairs of intra prediction mode indices and rate-distortion values for different block sizes, wherein the pairs of intra prediction mode indices and rate-distortion values for the different block sizes are computed in parallel based upon the source picture, wherein the intra search block omits most probable mode computations to achieve parallelism;
• an inter search block to process the intra search block output to produce inter search block output including pairs of motion vectors and rate-distortion values for different block sizes, wherein the pairs of motion vectors and rate-distortion values for the different block sizes are computed in parallel, wherein the inter search block omits motion vector prediction and merge list computations to achieve parallelism;
• a selection block to process the inter search block output to produce selection block output, the selection block performing most probable mode computations, motion vector prediction and merge list computations;
• a motion compensation prediction, quantization and reconstruction block to process the selection block output to produce motion compensation output;
• and
• an entropy encoder to process the motion compensation output to produce encoder output for transmittal to a decoder.