In the RESUME project we explore the use of reconfigurable hardware for the design of portable multimedia systems by developing a scalable wavelet-based video codec. A scalable video codec provides the ability to produce a smaller video stream with reduced frame rate, resolution or image quality starting from the original encoded video stream with almost no additional computation. For this codec we developed a new, hardware friendly wavelet entropy codec which is further optimized in this article. It was possible to increase the parallelism and reduce the memory footprint by a factor three with only a minor decrease of the compression ratio.