Inthis paper, we investigate the compatible coding technique, which receives much interest ever since the introduction of HDTV. First, attempts have been made to analyze the theoretical transform coding gains for various hierarchical decomposition techniques, namely subband, pyramid and DCT-based decomposition techniques. It is shown that the spatical domain techniques proide higher transform coding gains than the DCT-based coding technique. Secondly, we compare the performance of these spatial domain techniques, in terms of the PSNR versus various rate allocations to each layer. Based on these analyses, it is believed that the pyramid decomposition is more appropriate for the compatible coding. Also in this paper, we propose a hybrid prediction pyramid coding technique, by combining the spatio-temporal prediction in MPEG-2[3] and the adaptive MC(Motion Compensation)[1]. In the proposed coding technigue, we also employ an adaptive DCT coefficient scanning technique to exploit the direction information of the 2nd-layer signal. Through computer simulations, the proposed hybrid prediction with adaptive scanning technuque shows the PSNR improvement, by about 0.46-1.78dB at low 1st-layer rate(about 0.1bpp) over the adaptive MC[1], and by about 0.33-0.63dB at high 1st-layer rate (about 0.32-0.43bpp) over the spatio-temporal prediction[3].