A video decoding apparatus and method based on a data and function splitting scheme are disclosed. The video decoding apparatus based on a data and function splitting scheme includes a variable length decoding unit performing variable length decoding and parsing on a bit stream to acquire residual data and a decoding parameter, and splitting the residual data and the decoding parameter by row; and N (N is a natural number of 2 or larger) number of clusters splitting dequantization and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), motion vector prediction, intra prediction and motion compensation, video restoration, and deblocking function into M number of functions, acquiring the residual data, the decoding parameter, and macroblock (MB) processing information of an upper cluster by column, and splitting the information acquired by column into M number of functions to process the same.