Digital video compression ranges from coding still images to moving video for photographic, broadcasting, streaming, and conferencing applications. In traditional transform coding, pictures consisting of pixels are partitioned into blocks; each block of pixels is transformed; the transform coefficients are ordered and quantized; and some form of variable length coding (VLC, including arithmetic coding) is used to represent the series of quantized transform coefficients of each block. In many current standards, the blocks are of a fixed size, e.g., 8×8 for JPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2/H.262, MPEG4, H.261, and H.263. While some coding methods, e.g., the high profile of H.264/AVC, allow for two block sizes (4×4 and optionally 8×8) within the same picture, the VLC method for all blocks is the same for the one picture. In all of these standard coding methods, the VLC method is either two-dimensional variable length coding (2DVLC) or one of its many variations, such as Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC), Context Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) and Context-Based 2D Variable Length Coding (C2DVLC).