Extensive video quality evaluation: A scalable video testing platform

With the advent of new upcoming online video services such as IPTV, video on demand (VoD) and peer-to-peer (P2P) video streaming, content providers are gaining more and more interest in measuring and monitoring video quality as perceived by end-users; also known as quality of experience (QoE). Objective video quality metrics provide a means of measuring visual quality degradations but in order to be able to measure QoE, these objective metrics should incorporate all quality affecting parameters such as encoding bitrate, network impairments and error concealment techniques. As a consequence, in order to construct or validate a proper objective video quality metric, extensive video evaluation tests must be performed. In this paper we present a scalable video testing platform that simplifies the management and execution of such video quality evaluation tests. Results indicate that the use of our testing platform drastically reduces overall experiment duration.