A wireless network device to support quality-aware adaptive media streaming includes a radio-frequency transceiver, a processor operably coupled to the radio-frequency transceiver, and a memory device operably coupled to the processor. The memory storing instructions that configure the processor to parse a manifest file to read information characterizing media content available for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) adaptive streaming, obtain quality information of the media content based on a quality attribute parsed from the manifest file, and dynamically switch streaming between different encoded portions of the media content in response to the quality information for an encoded portion of the media content deviating from a desired quality value.