Apparatus and method for rate control in accordance with block and stream analyses

A hardware encoder, comprising:

• a pipelined hardware design, including:
• a block analyzer configured in hardware to selectively alter encoding parameters of every coding unit or coding tree unit in response to encoder conditions and an analysis of the coding unit or coding tree unit;
• a quantization transform and reconstruction block after the block analyzer in the pipelined hardware design;
• an entropy coding block after the quantization transform and reconstruction block in the pipelined hardware design;
• and
• a stream analyzer simultaneously operative with the block analyzer operating as a software process on one or more computational cores to selectively alter encoding parameters, including quantization parameters and rounding offsets used in quantization in the quantization transform and reconstruction block in response to evaluation of a plurality of parameters received in a feedback loop from the entropy coding block, the entropy coding block supplying the plurality of parameters that are associated with a stream of video data comprising multiple coding units or coding tree units, the stream analyzer communicating solely with the entropy coding block and the quantization transform and reconstruction block.