This paper proposes a new method for the protection of copyrighted multimedia content. Here the problems of compression and selective encryption (SE) have been simultaneously addressed for the state of the art video codec H.264/AVC. SE is performed in the context adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) module of video codec. For this purpose, CAVLC is converted to an encryption cipher using permutation of equal length codes from a specific variable length coding (VLC) table. In our scheme, entropy coding engine serves the purpose of encryption step without affecting the coding efficiency of H.264/AVC by keeping the bitrate unchanged and generating completely compliant bit stream. Our scheme requires a negligible computational power. Nine different benchmark video sequences containing different combinations of motion, texture and objects are used for experimental evaluation of the proposed algorithm.