Communication networks based on Internet Protocol (IP) are becoming increasingly popular for video delivery applications since they offer widespread footprint and data capacity at low cost.

IP, however, is inherently unreliable and only provides a best-effort packet delivery mechanism.

Live TV signals are typically carried over IP networks encapsulated in MPEG2 Transport Streams, since the Transport Stream (TS) is tailored for communicating or storing one or more programs of coded video and other data in environments in which significant errors may occur (since this is the nature of IP environments).

All TS packets contain a continuity_counter, which is a 4-bit field incrementing with each TS packet with the same PID and wrapping around to 0 after its maximum value.

The continuity_counter therefore provides means to detect packet delivery anomalies, such as packet reordering and packet loss which degrade user experience of the live TV service.

TSLemurs multicast stream checker tool is a FREE software analyzer probe that detects CC (continuity_counter) errors in Transport Streams and provides information on quality of the IP link used to carry the live TV service and possible degradations of user experience.

The tool is used for signal quality assurance at the sender (origin) node and for IP link quality assurance on the receiver (destination) node: