A method and apparatus for direct Simplified Depth Coding (dSDC) to derive prediction value directly for each segment without deriving depth prediction samples or depth prediction subsamples. The dSDC method substantially reduces the computations associated with deriving the prediction samples or subsamples and calculating the average of the prediction samples or subsamples by deriving the prediction value directly based on the reconstructed neighboring depth samples. The direct SDC can be applied to derive the two prediction values, P0 and P1 for the two segments of a depth block coded by SDC depth modelling mode 1 (DMM-1).