Evaluating the Effect of Compression on Video Temporal Consistency Using Objective Quality Metrics

Abstract

While video compression algorithms effectively reduce bitrate, aggressive quantization often compromises temporal coherence, introducing artifacts such as flicker, motion inconsistency, and unstable textures. Although spatial quality degradation is well-documented, the relationship between compression intensity and temporal stability remains insufficiently characterized. This paper systematically examines the progression of frame-to-frame coherence errors across different bitrate regimes, utilizing multiple codecs (AV1, HEVC, VP9, H.264) and content types. Our findings reveal that temporal consistency degrades non-linearly with increasing compression. Most critically, we identify a "Predictability anomaly" where sequences with unpredictable or irregular dynamics experience disproportionately higher instability than sequences with higher, but more predictable, motion magnitude. This challenges the conventional assumption that motion volume alone dictates encoding difficulty and highlights the necessity of temporal-aware metrics in compression pipelines.