Spirent Communications and Psytechnics are collaborating to offer a video quality assessment test system for carriers, service providers and equipment vendors. The test system measures video quality as well as a broad range of video distortion and degradation parameters under various network configurations and real-world load conditions. The solution is aimed at video on-demand and IPTV services, where ensuring satisfactory end user experience is a necessary ingredient of a successful service rollout.
Spirent has licensed the Psytechnics Video Agent (PVA), a full reference video quality measurement tool based on the ITU J.144 standard and part of the Psytechnics family of Assessment Modules. Spirent has integrated the PVA into its Abacus 5000 IP Telephony Test Migration System.
The test system works by sending reference video clips into the device or system under test. Using a complex video quality assessment algorithm, the test system compares the received video clip from the output of the system under test to the reference clip and provides a MOS (Mean Opinion Score) video quality rating score on a scale of 1 to 5. Additionally, the test system provides several video degradation metrics including Blockiness, Blurriness, Jerkiness, Frame Freeze Events, Frame Skip Events, Temporal Complexity and Spatial Complexity. In addition to performing this testing in a lab environment, two or more test systems can be distributed at various points of the network to perform pre-production assessment of voice and video quality in a real network environment with various levels of real world traffic load. This will help carriers diagnose problems in the network and get an accurate picture of what the network is capable of and where it may break down.
http://www.spirentcom.com
http://www.psytechnics.com
