A moving image compression (or encoding) device including: a hardware
processing section which compresses moving image data by hardware; a data
storage section which stores the moving image data processed by the
hardware processing section; and a software processing section which
compresses the moving image data from the data storage section by
software. The hardware processing section includes a plurality of
processing sections which perform processing including a discrete cosine
transform and quantization of the moving image data. The software
processing section performs variable-length coding of the quantized
moving image data.