The video decoder 210 may include the parser 320 to reconstruct symbols 321 from the entropy coded video sequence. Categories of those symbols include, for example, information used to manage operation of the decoder 210, and potentially information to control a rendering device such as a display 212 that may be coupled to a decoder as illustrated in FIG. 2. The control information for the rendering device(s) may be in the form of, for example, Supplementary Enhancement Information (SEI) messages or Video Usability Information (VUI) parameter set fragments (not depicted). The parser 320 may parse/entropy-decode the coded video sequence received. The coding of the coded video sequence can be in accordance with a video coding technology or standard, and can follow principles well known to a person skilled in the art, including variable length coding, Huffman coding, arithmetic coding with or without context sensitivity, and so forth. The parser 320 may extract from the coded video sequence a set of subgroup parameters for at least one of the subgroups of pixels in the video decoder, based upon at least one parameters corresponding to the group. Subgroups can include Groups of Pictures (GOPs), pictures, tiles, slices, macroblocks, Coding Units (CUs), blocks, Transform Units (TUs), Prediction Units (PUs) and so forth. The parser 320 may also extract from the coded video sequence information such as transform coefficients, quantizer parameter values, motion vectors, and so forth.

The parser 320 may perform entropy decoding/parsing operation on the video sequence received from the buffer 315, so to create symbols 321.