The program monitor is implemented on a platform that uses Microsoft’s Windows NT operating system. Operating an a networked system, the PQM300 program monitor application is configured to begin automatically after the power-on initialization and program loading are completed. An optional SVGA monitor can be connected for a local display and the program monitor can be controlled using a keyboard and a mouse. The PQM300 program monitor provides program service quality assessments of live Rec. 601 digital video signals. Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring provides the following assessments and capabilities: MPEG Defects Real-time MPEG defect (Discrete Cosine Transform based blockiness artifacts) monitoring and reporting when a signal is present. The PDI level (Picture Defect Indicator) provides immediate and continuous indication of the video image quality. Fixed (manual) setting of blockiness period for a given pixel block size for the MPEG defects measurement. Adaptive settings to automatically determine blockiness periods used for the MPEG defects measurement. Period selection to monitor the detected blockiness period. This is a tool to find the correct period for the fixed period setting and to monitor the incoming video for blockiness period changes. Frozen Frame, Repeated Frames, Loss of Service Video content constant (consecutive fields exactly identical) Repeated frame found in a moving sequence Absence of a serial digital video signal Absence of video content on the input Uncorrelated Noise Indicates the amount of white Gaussian noise in the video signal (such as that injected by analog video circuits) Alarm Level Monitoring Individual alarm settings for all measurements (including blockiness period) Level thresholds for amplitude of error Time thresholds in number of fields for duration of error condition Percentage thresholds for an amount of error within a defined time threshold