Patent 7630443 was granted and assigned to Sony on December, 2009 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A video decoding apparatus and method capable of performing high-speed reproduction of image data subjected to coding with a prescribed coding scheme for adaptively performing field-structured or frame-structured coding, with a simple configuration. In a high-speed reproduction mode, a decoding process is applied to only coded image data of intra-frame coded pictures subjected to the frame-structured coding or of one field in the intra-frame coded pictures and coded image data of intra-field coded pictures subjected to the field-structured coding.