Abstract: A method of automatic measurement of compressed video quality superimposes special markings in the active video region of a subset of contiguous frames within a test video sequence. The special markings provide a temporal reference, a spatial reference, a gain/level reference, a measurement code, a test sequence identifier and/or a prior measurement value. The temporal reference is used by a programmable instrument to extract a processed frame from the test video sequence after compression encoding-decoding which is temporally aligned with a reference frame from the test video sequence. The spatial reference is used by the programmable instrument to spatially align the processed frame to the reference frame. The measurement code is used by the programmable instrument to select the appropriate measurement protocol from among a plurality of measurement protocols.