We propose a near optimal hardware architecture for deblocking filter in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. We propose a novel filtering order and a data reuse strategy that result in significant saving in filtering time, local memory usage, and memory traffic. Every 16-16 macroblock requires 192 filtering operations. After a few initialization cycles, our 5-stage pipelined architecture is able to perform one filtering operation per cycle. Compared with some state-of-the-art designs, our architecture delivers the fastest level of performance while using much smaller gate count and memory. We have implemented and integrated the proposed deblocking filter into an H.264 main profile video decoder and verified it with an FPGA prototype.