This paper presents a remnant error concealment (REC) technique based on generic error concealment (GEC). Two most common issues in video error recovery systems are the locations of lost blocks and error recovery techniques. By using a multistage error detection algorithm to obtain the location of lost blocks of random bit error in the MPEG-2 bit stream, the REC technique uses the spatial neighborhood information to recover the lost blocks. Firstly, estimating the DC (direct current) value of the error block from the DC values of adjacent blocks, a preliminary recovered block is obtained. Subsequently, GEC is applied by using the remnant information (the boundary variations of preliminary recovered block and adjacent blocks) as input and the object function is modified accordingly. Simulation results indicate that REC can achieve input tolerance of a bit error rate (BER) as high as 1/3000, which is significantly improved over the GEC's BER /spl ap/10/sup -5/. In terms of visual performance, the result of REC is smoother than that of GEC.