Analysis of H.264 Sensitivity to Packet Loss and Delay Variation

The number and popularity of multimedia services and applications on the Internet has increased greatly in recent years. Services employing real-time video, such as mobile TV, video-conferencing and tele-medicine are growing, and the users expectations of quality are increasing. This thesis analyses the impact on perceived quality of received videos sent across a network, emulation is used to emulate network characteris- tics with packet loss and delay variation for video sequences with different characteristics. This work aims to understand the user perception of video quality with packet loss and delay variation for videos encoded with H.264 on laptop computers and mobile phones. Further, it seeks to understand if users have different video quality expectations for laptops and mobile phones. The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) and statistical methods are used to evaluate the video quality perceived by users. It was found that packet loss and delay variation affects the perceived quality of video. In addition, it is shown that there is no significance difference between doing the experiment in the mobile phone or in the laptop displaying the same resolution