— Long initial access cycles of SDRAM are the major performance burden of motion compensation in a video decoder. To minimize its effect while improve overall available memory bandwidth, this paper presents an optimal data mapping scheme for motion compensation in H.264 video coding. This scheme allocates the video data into suitable address and bank according to the access characteristics of SDRAM access and address transition in motion compensation. The resulted allocation can reduce the required bandwidth of motion compensation by 36% when compared to the previous design for 525SD video sequences.