In the last few years distributed video coding (DVC) has become a new paradigm for video compression where the encoding process needs to be simple. DVC allows for the development of new applications where the computational complexity and the amount of memory inside the video encoder are limited. In this paper, we introduce a new data representation and coding method for DVC systems. The proposed method consists of an adaptive binary representation based on the maximum difference between the source picture and the side information. This adaptive representation provides a reduction of bitrate without any loss of information, while maintaining the low complexity of the encoder. Experimental results show a significant increase in performance over conventional DVC methods.