Video data compression is a major key technology in the field of multimedia applications. Variable-length coding is the most popular data compression technique which has been used in many data compression standards, such as JPEG, MPEG and image data compression standards, etc. We present a memory-efficient VLC decoder architecture for MPEG-2 application which can achieve small memory space and higher throughput. To reduce the memory size, we propose a new grouping, remainder generation method and merged lookup table (LUT) for variable length decoders (VLDs). In the MPEG-2, the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient table zero and one are mapped onto one memory whose space requirement has been minimized by using efficient memory mapping strategy. The proposed memory size is only 256 words in spite of mapping two DCT coefficient tables.