To increase the memory bandwidth of SDRAM (synchronous DRAM) that is commonly employed as external memory in video applications such as MPEG2, a memory address translation method is proposed for minimising the number of overhead cycles needed for row-activations and precharges. The features of SDRAM and the characteristics of memory accesses in video processing applications are considered to find a suitable address translation method. Experimental results show that the proposed method increases the memory bandwidth by 44% over that possible using conventional linear translation.