In the H.264/ AVC video coding standard, the intra-prediction coding with various block sizes offers a considerably high improvement in coding efficiency compared to previous standards. In order to achieve this, H.264/AVC uses the Rate-distortion optimization (RDO) technique to select the best intraprediction mode for a macroblock, and it brings about the drastic increase of the computation complexity of H.264 encoder. To reduce the computation complexity and stabilize the coding performance on visual quality, this paper proposed a fast intra-prediction mode decision algorithm using non-parametric thresholds and simplified directional masks. The use of nonparametric thresholds makes the intra-coding performance not be dependent on types of video sequences and simplified directional masks reduces the compuation loads needed by the calculation of local edge information. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce more than 55% of the whole encoding time with a negligible loss in PSNR and bitrates and provides the stable performance regardless types of video sequences.