With the development of communication and video coding technology

it is possible to transport video content via network and wireless channel at present. In these circumstances

with the existence of packet loss (network) and bit errors (wireless channel)

video data is corrupted usually. To overcome this

many methods have been proposed. These methods can be classified into three main fields: source coding

channel coding and joint source and channel coding. Multiple description(MD) coding has been proved to be an effective method of source coding to overcome errors(packet loss specially) in channel transport. To make people have a concise knowledge on the multiple description coding

the main features of MD coding are presented. From the views of source coding and channel coding

the main methods used to solve the problem of packet loss are concluded respectively. Additionally

some new advances in the application and research of MD are discussed. Finally

the authors point out the of the future work.