A method and system of transform-based encoding, decoding, and bitstream generation of digital video content. The digital video content comprises a stream of pictures, slices, or macroblocks which can each be intra, predicted or bi-predicted pictures. The pictures, slices, or macroblocks comprise blocks of pixels. The method comprises scanning frequency coefficients from each of the block's two dimensional array of frequency coefficients in a manner that is vertically biased.