The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based custom computer is a new computing paradigm which can provide fast and flexible processing. This paper describes the implementation of 2D DCT algorithms for video compression using a FPGA-based custom computer. Our experimental result shows that by using an FPGA-based custom computer, the speed for processing 2-D Discrete Cosine Transforms in video compression can be improved 50 to 100 times when compared with workstation or super-computer implementations