Towards Quality Evaluation and Improvement of a MPEG Video Stream

The transport of a digital video with satisfactory quality over packet networks is still a challenging issue. Video Flows have contents with different importance during the coding phase, while packet networks do not provide native mechanisms that can prioritize the more important contents. In this work, we present a metric of quality that permits the evaluation of received videos, qualitatively and quantitatively. We also analyze some different techniques conducted over differentiated service networks (packet discard schemes and data redundancy, widely used in multimedia streaming) to validate our proposed metric. Key-words: “QoS”, “MPEG video”, “metric”.