Methods and apparatus are presented herein to perform selective and/or scalable complexity control of the video codec, so that the amount of processing resources consumed by a video codec may be increased or reduced. Based on the configurable thresholds set within complexity control algorithms, the nonpredictive and the predictive coding sections of the video codec may be selectively implemented. The configurable thresholds are used to determine whether a desired amount of spatial information, such as texture information or motion information, is present within a video frame.