Video Quality Monitor (VQM) is a precise and the flexible solution to measure and monitor the video quality perceived by end-users.

VQM produces perceived video quality scores expressed on a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) scale. VQM’s perceived video quality metrics are dedicated to MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/AVC (H.264) video encoding formats. These video quality metrics have been optimized to produce quality scores which are highly correlated with human jugdments collected during subjective quality assessment tests in normalised conditions (ITU BT.500 and ITU BT.710).

VQM enables:

• perceived video quality measurement of video files, without reference
• perceived video quality monitoring of a live video source in real time, without reference
• measurement of blockiness (sometimes called “blocking effect”), blur (sometimes called “blurring”), contrast, jerkiness (sometimes called “image freezing”), bitrate
• audio or video signal loss detection
• audio loudness measurement and monitoring according to recommendations ITU BS 1770-2 and EBU R128
• video decoders (Set Top Box) test and validation
• monitoring of file-based encoding (example: encoding for VOD)
• video cameras benchmarking and comparison using the camera noise metric

For monitoring of file-based encoding (example: encoding for VoD): VQM can process several files in parallel. This is particularly useful to process a large number of files (using the Watch Folder for example). VQM can even test the decodability of audio and video at about 40x speed (on a simple PC) and count the number of decoded audio samples and video frames. And if these values are different than the expected values (based on header information), VQM can send you alerts.

VQM is a software product. It works under Windows (XP, Vista, Seven) and is easy to install (especially if you just want to use the no reference metrics, in this case you just have to run the installer and click on “Next…” several times). It can run on virtually any PC. It can even run on a laptop. If possible, the recommended configuration is: 4-core CPU, 3 GB of RAM, 10 GB of free hard disk space.