We examine the efficiency of two FEC strategies for the protection of HDTV video packets transmitted at variable bit rate. The first FEC strategy pursues packet protection by means of a fired Reed-Solomon code. The second strategy encodes a set of packets within a fixed time frame resulting in Reed-Solomon codes of variable length. We quantify the performance of both strategies for a representative movie where the HDTV video packets are transmitted at variable bit rate over a channel that is subjected to independent errors and error bursts.