We propose a reduced complexity technique for the rate-distortion optimization in JVT/H.26L in the presence of packet erasures. It is named "few decoders in the encoder", and is based on the idea of generating a selected number of error patterns in the encoder, so that a limited number of co-decoding processes can be implemented to estimate the transmission distortion term. The correlation amongst packet erasures is taken into account by employing a binary Gilbert model. The proposed algorithm exhibits competitive performance in terms of average PSNR and probability of decoding failure, with very affordable complexity and memory requirements.