A circuit generally having a first module, a second module and a third module is disclosed. The first module may be configured to (i) generate a plurality of parsed residual blocks by parsing an 8×8 CABAC (context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding) residual block received in an input signal and (ii) generate a plurality of metric signals resulting from the parsing of the 8×8 CABAC residual block. The second module may be configured to generate a scanning position signal based on the metric signals. The third module may be configured to generating a plurality of 4×4 CAVLC (context-based adaptive variable length coding) residual blocks in an output signal by sub-sampling the parsed residual blocks based on the scanning position signal.