This paper presents the definition and implementation design of a low power data bus encoding scheme dedicated to system on chip video architectures. Trends in CMOS technologies focus the attention on the energy consumption issue related to on-chip global communication; this is especially true for data dominated applications such as video processing. Taking into account scaling effects a novel coupling-aware bus power model is used to investigate the statistical properties of video data collected in the system bus of a reference hardware/software H.263/MPEG-4 video coder architecture. The results of this analysis and the low complexity requirements drive the definition of a bus encoding scheme called CDSPBI (Coupling Driven Separated Partial Bus Invert), optimized ad-hoc for video data. A VLSI implementation of the coding circuits completes the work with an area/delay/power characterization that shows the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of global power saving for a small circuit area overhead.