Abstract: A frame memory interface architecture which is easily adaptable to interface to any of a plurality of frame memory storage architectures. In the preferred embodiment, the present invention comprises an MPEG decoder system and method for decoding frames of a video sequence. The MPEG decoder includes various slave devices which access a single external memory, wherein these slave devices include reconstruction logic or motion compensation logic, a reference frame buffer, display logic, a prefetch buffer, and host bitstream logic, among others. Each of the slave devices is capable of storing or retrieving data to/from the memory according to different frame storage formats, such as a scan line format, a tiled format, and a skewed tile format, among others. The frame memory interface is easily re-configurable to each of these different formats, thus providing improved efficiency according to the present invention. The slave device then generates a request to the memory controller.