An image encoding apparatus includes a quantization control section that supplies a rounded Q-scale to a quantization section for quantizing each macroblock according to the rounded Q-scale. A Q-scale is generated for each macroblock based on the amount of generated codes produced by encoding. The Q-scale is rounded within a set range by a rounding control section. The rounded Q-scale is smaller in amount than the Q-scale. Since the same Q-scale values will continue in succession, these can be omitted from a stream, allowing the reduced amount of quantization information and the increased amount of information allocated to images.