Summary Motion estimation and compensation techniques are widely used for video coding applications but the real-time motion estimation is not easily achieved due to its enormous computations. Therefore, it would be greatly beneficial to optimize as much as possible the motion estimation bloc which is considered to be the most important in terms of computational cost. In this paper, a new fast block size selection DSP-based algorithm is presented, in which computation complexity is greatly reduced when achieving the same video quality. Experimental results show a 45.75% improvement in speed with no major loss in video quality (objective (PSNR) and subjective (SSIM)).