Error concealment in video communication is becoming increasingly important because of the growing interest in video delivery over unreliable channels such as wireless networks and the Internet. A subclass of this error concealment in video communication is known as motion vector recovery (MVR). MVR techniques try to retrieve the lost motion information in the compressed video streams based on the available information in the locality (both spatial and temporal) of the lost data. The activities and practice in the area of MVR-based error concealment during the last two decades has been mainly elaborated here. A performance comparison of the prominent MVR techniques has also been presented. Copyright © 2011 by the IETE.