This paper presents a macroblock-level (MB-level) decoding and deblocking method for supporting the flexible macroblock ordering (FMO) and arbitrary slice ordering (ASO) bit streams in H.264 decoder and its SOC/ASIC implementation.By searching the slice containing the current macroblock in the bit stream and switching slices correctly, MBs can be decoded in the raster scan order, while the decoding process can immediately begin as long as the slice containing the current MB is available.This architectural modification enables the MB-level decoding and deblocking 3-stage pipeline, and saves about 20% of SDRAM bandwidth. Implementation results showed that the design achieves real-time decoding of 1080HD (1920×1088@30 fps) at a system clock of 166 MHz.