This paper presents a cost-effective two-dimensional (2-D) inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) for supporting multiple standards of MPEG 1/2/4, H.264, VC-1, and HEVC. The proposed approach employs a time allocation scheme to enable the simultaneous processing of the first and second dimensions in order to enhance data throughput and attain hardware utilization of 100%. The proposed one-dimensional (1-D) IDCT uses distributed arithmetic (DA) in conjunction with factor sharing (FS) within a hardware sharing architecture. Four parallel computation streams are employed to enhance the throughput rate as four times of operation frequency. The efficacy of this approach was verified by fabricating a test chip using the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC) 90 nm Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) process. The inverse transform core has an operating frequency of 200 MHz and a throughput of 800 M-pels/s with a gate count of 27.2 K.