This paper proposes a study on the design of AMBA AHB Bus-based DMA master block for efficient transfer of ITU-R BT.656 digital video data. The DMA master detects, analyzes the 656 data format and then transfers the data with less bandwidth than that of conventional DMA controllers. The main characteristic of the DMA master is that it is specialized to video data processing. Sync detection and H/W triggering for the system throughput, planner/packed modes of video plane for processing efficiency, and automatic chaining DMA for video overlay are the improvements for that purpose. It also has other useful characteristics such as scatter/gathering, S/W trigger and monitoring function and several registers to control the functions.