A novel unequal error protection technique is presented for the transmission of H263 compressed and turbo-coded video sequences over a UMTS/TDD wireless system. The overall redundancy added to the compressed stream is non-uniformly distributed between the succeeding video frames in order to minimize the mean distortion over the transmitted sequence. The repartition of the redundancy on the video stream is optimized using an analytical approach, which aims to alleviate the error propagation along the sequence. Different puncturing patterns of the rate 1/3 turbo-coder were considered in our simulations. Experimental results show that the gain (in terms of the peak signal to noise ratio) over the classical equal error protection scheme can reach 1.5 dB without any increase in the transmission rate or the receiver complexity.