Abstract: Methods and apparatus for removing blocking effect in a motion picture decoder are provided. Boundary pixel values of a current block and corresponding adjacent blocks are extracted boundary. A mean value for the resulting difference values between the extracted pixel values of the current and adjacent blocks is calculated. The calculated mean value is limited within a range of -(1/2) quantization step size to (1/2) quantization step size. The limited mean value is added to the each of the pixel values of the current block to generate. In another aspect, absolute values for the difference values between boundary pixel values of the current and adjacent blocks are calculated. The calculated absolute values are compared with a threshold level to determine whether the current block contains an edge. Therefore, only the current block not having an edge is selected and filtered, thereby removing the blocking effect due to a quantization error without having distortion to the original data.