In this paper, we present an efficient H.264 intra frame coder system that achieves real-time performance for portable consumer electronics applications with low hardware cost. The system includes a low cost intra prediction hardware design that implements all intra prediction modes used in H.264 video coding standard based on a novel organization of the intra prediction equations. The proposed hardware is implemented in Verilog HDL. The Verilog RTL code works at 71 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA and it can code 35 CIF (352 times 288) frames per second. The system also includes software running on an Arm926EJS processor for implementing pre-processing and post-processing functions. The H.264 intra frame coder system is demonstrated to work correctly on an Arm Versatile Platform development board and it is verified to be compliant with H.264 standard.