This paper discusses the construction and implementation problem of trellis coded quantization (TCQ) based data hiding. We explore the robustness and distortion of data hiding by analyzing its duality with distributed source coding. Based on our analysis a new implementation of the powerful trellis coded modulation (TCM) and TCQ data hiding scheme is presented. It simplifies the construction process with only one trellis and achieves a good tradeoff between robustness and distortion by embedding the information in the middle input of TCQ. Simulation is conducted for Gaussian, Laplacian and real image sources under additive Gaussian noise attack. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new implementation.