Small refactoring: Instead of 4 loops for decoding AC coefficients based on their grouping, create one loop that indexes into a table of AC VLC tables. There is also a small optimization here: Do not call unpack_vlcs() if there are no fragments in the list with outstanding coefficients. My profiling indicates that this can save upwards of 1 million dezicycles per frame throughout the course of unpack_dct_coeffs().