A method, system and apparatus for adaptive pre-filtering includes: extracting tuning parameters from video data in a video encoding process; processing the tuning parameters to generate control parameters representative of properties of the video data; coupling the control parameters to a filter response; generating filter coefficients according to the filter response; and filtering the video data using the filter coefficients prior to video encoding. The filtering of video data may thus be adapted to one or more tuning parameters of the video data and the encoding process. The filtering may decrease the complexity of encoding by an attenuation of high frequency signals, effectively decreasing the quantization step and reducing compression artifacts.