A method and apparatus are disclosed for predicting subjective quality of a video contained in a bit stream on a packet layer. Header information of the bit-stream is parsed and frame layer information, such as frame type, is estimated. Visible artifact levels are then estimated based on frame layer information. An overall artifact level and quality metric are estimated based on artifact levels for individual frames with other parameters. Specifically, different weighting factors are used for different frame types when estimating the levels of initial visible artifacts and propagated visible artifacts. The number of slices per frame is used as a parameter when estimating the overall artifact level for the video. Moreover, the quality assessment model considers quality loss caused by both coding and channel artifacts.