[M4IF Technotes] Common ways to evaluate encoded video quality?

[Howard Stateman]

To expand a little on Christophe's fine FAQ, and to help address the
original question, I'd like to share an anecdote.
A few years ago I was the competitive analysis engineer for a major player
in streaming media, tasked with analyzing audio/video streams from the major
players, with the goal of making useful suggestions to our codec team for
improving our product relative to the competition's.
After making my own analysis, and having several "golden ear" and "golden
eye" experts add their input, I brought in about a dozen non-experts - admin
assistants, marketing folks, non-media progammers, etc. to tell us what they
thought of the streams.
Even though it was clear to the experts that my company's video was sharper,
more color-accurate and had fewer artifacts in high-motion frames, the
non-experts (a.k.a. potential customers) liked the competion's video better.
We discovered the huge role which psychology has to play in percieved
quality of streaming media.
---------------
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: technotes-admin   lists.m4if.org
> [mailto:technotes-admin   lists.m4if.org]On Behalf Of
> Christophe Vermeulen
> Sent: Monday, June 23, 2023 4:05 AM
>
> - Is there an way to evaluate objectively the quality of a bitstream ?
>
>   Although many algorithms exist (insert link list), and
> several commercial
>   applications of these algorithms have been provided for
> years, no single
>   method has ever proven better than subjective testing from experts.
>
>