A method for judging a lost block characteristic in a video processing system including certifying whether a lost block exists among transmitted video blocks, calculating a temporal difference cost.sub.1 between neighborhood pixels of the lost block in a present frame and a previous frame, and calculating a motion vector distribution value cost.sub.2 of peripheral blocks of the lost video block. The method also includes comparing the temporal difference cost.sub.1 and the motion vector distribution value cost.sub.2 with preset threshold values, and determining a characteristic of the lost block based on a result of the comparison. The automatically judged characteristic of the lost block is utilized as information for recovering the lost block to thereby reproduce a recovery video close to the original video.