In one embodiment, a process determines a size of a video unit (e.g., frame) to transmit from a sender to a receiver across a communication channel for an associated video stream, and also determines an updated packet loss rate on the channel. In response, the process may dynamically determine both a number N of video data packets and a number M of forward error correction (FEC) packets to transmit for the video unit based on the size of the video unit, the updated packet loss rate on the channel, and an error resilience requirement for the video stream. In an illustrative embodiment, N and M are determined during transmission of the video stream through a look-up operation into a table indexed by the size of the video unit and the updated packet loss rate as co-indices, the co-indices co-indexing a pre-determined N and M pair.