EVALUATION OF MPEG-2 FAMILY CODECS

Abstract

This study investigates the quality of MPEG-2 decoders when decoding video streams with different levels of distortion. The relevance of this research is due to the widespread use of MPEG-2 in satellite and digital television, as well as in video playback from DVDs and other media, where streams may contain errors. The aim of the study is to comparatively evaluate the resilience of various MPEG-2 decoders to corrupted streams and to identify factors affecting visual decoding quality. To achieve this goal, the following tasks were performed: encoding standard test video sequences, generating streams with controlled errors, decoding with various MPEG-2 decoders, assessing quality using the per-frame Y-PSNR metric, and classifying decoders according to their error-handling capabilities. Experiments were repeated 100 times for each bit error probability on the Foreman and Battle sequences (10^-4, 10^-5, 10^-6). Results demonstrated significant differences in visual quality among decoders of the same standard: libavcodec from FFDShow provided the best performance due to interpolation of corrupted blocks, whereas InterVideo, BitControl, MainConcept, and Pinnacle decoders exhibited low error resilience. The conclusion confirms the hypothesis regarding differences in error-handling algorithms among MPEG-2 decoders and emphasizes the practical importance of selecting optimal decoders for operation under unreliable transmission conditions. The results can be applied in DVB equipment design and in developing video stream quality testing methodologies.