Fast growth of multimedia applications requires new functions for video data processing. such as obj;cted-based video representation and manipulation. which are not supported by 11PEG-l and 11PEG-2. To support these requirements. 11PEG-4 video coding allows users to manipulate every video object easily by decomposing a scene into several video objects and coding each of them independently. However. the large amount of computations and flexible structure of 11PEG-4 video CODEC make it difficult to be implemented by either the general purpose DSP or a dedicated VLSI. In this paper, we propose a hardware architecture using a hybrid of a high performance programmable DSP and an application specific IC to implement a flexible 11PEG-4 video codec requiring the large amount of computations. The application specific IC has the functions of motion estimation and compensation.