Recent advances in reconfigurable computing have led to new ways of implementing complex algorithms while maintaining reasonable throughput. Video codecs are becoming more complex in order to provide efficient compression for video with ever-increasing resolution. This problem is compounded by the fact that spectra of video decoding devices has become wider in the move from traditional TV to cable and satellite TV, IPTV, mobile TV, and Internet media. MPEG is tackling this problem with a reconfigurable video coding (RVC) framework and is standardizing a modular definition of tools and connections. MPEG’s work started with video coding and has recently extended to graphics data coding. RVC will be supported by non-MPEG standards such as the Chinese audio-video standard (AVS). This article gives a brief background to the reconfigurable codec framework. The key to this framework is reconfigurability and reducing granularity to find commonality between different standards.