Pipelined deblocking filter

An apparatus and method for pipelined deblocking includes a filter having a filtering engine, a plurality of registers in signal communication with the filtering engine, a pipeline control unit in signal communication with the filtering engine, and a finite state machine in signal communication with the pipeline control unit; and a method of filtering a block of pixel data processed with block transformations to reduce blocking artifacts includes filtering a first edge of the block, and filtering a third edge of the block no more than three edges after filtering the first edge, wherein the third edge is perpendicular to the first edge.