Innovations in the area of encoding or decoding of blocks using intra block copy (“BC”) prediction improve coding efficiency for intra-BC-predicted blocks in many situations. For example, some of the innovations relate to block flipping in which an intra-BC-predicted block is flipped relative to a reference region, which can be indicated by a block vector (“BV”) value. Other innovations relate to signaling of a skip mode in which a current intra-BC-predicted block uses a signaled BV differential but lacks residual data.