A method and an apparatus are provided for evaluating media delivery quality that relate to the field of communications technologies and that can directly reflect a variation of media delivery quality and a variation of subjective experience of a user on media play quality. A method for evaluating media delivery quality includes: receiving media data, and measuring a data amount of the media data received within the period of time; parsing the media data, and acquiring a play rate of the media data; simulating, a decoding buffer in a process of playing the media data received within the period of time, to acquire a virtual decoding buffer and acquire a size of the virtual decoding buffer; and determining, according to the size of the virtual decoding buffer, whether a pause occurs in the process of playing the media data received within the period of time.