1. A method for recovery of lost/damaged data comprising the steps of: generating candidate hypotheses of decoding for lost/damaged data within a received bitstream of data; generating scores for the candidate hypotheses; selecting a hypothesis corresponding to a best score from the generated scores; decoding the lost/damaged data according to the selected hypothesis; evaluating at least one candidate hypothesis and selectively flagging data based upon the evaluation; and executing an error recovery process on the flagged data.