coding theory (Score 1)

There is an entire field of study related to this topic, but, in short, Reed-Solomon codes are not currently the state of the art. There are much more efficient iterative codes (e.g. Low-Density Parity-Check codes) and there are also rateless codes for a more incremental protection. At any rate, the right place to use these is probably at the hardware level ... even if efficiency is not an issue, they tend to require a fair amount of redundancy.