This paper proposes an adaptive algorithm for the quantization step size control of MPEG-2, using the information obtained from the previously encoded picture. Before quantizing the DCT coefficients, the properties of reconstruction error of each macro block (MB) is predicted from the previous frame. For the prediction of the error of current MB, a block with the size of MB in the previous frame are chosen by use of the motion vector. Since the original and reconstructed images of the previous frame are available in the encoder, we can calculate the reconstruction error of this block. This error is considered as the expected error of the current MB if it is quantized with the same step size and bit rate. Comparing the error of the MB with the average of overall MBs, if it is larger than the average, small step size is given for this MB, and vice versa. As a result, the error distribution of the MB is more concentrated to the average, giving low variance and improved image quality. Especially for the low bit application, the proposed algorithm gives much smaller error variance and higher PSNR compared to TM5 (test model 5).