A block decoding method and apparatus capable of decoding and outputting data in a longitudinal direction, which scans a compressed datastream and accordingly obtains a start address in the compressed datastream for each MCUR of a decompressed image, such that the apparatus can obtain blocks rotated with 90 degrees by performing a Huffman decoding in a longitudinal direction, a de-zigzag arrangement, an inverse quantization, an IDCT and a rotation. Since the decoding direction is identical to the output direction of a printer, only a desired column of data in the decompressed image is temporarily stored for output and accordingly the required memory size is relatively reduced.