Patent ID: 7725576

Claim:
A stream monitoring system, comprising: one or more stream monitoring computers including a first sub-system for provisioning a stream quality test; a set of monitoring agents positioned at given network locations for executing the stream quality test, each of the monitoring agents associated with a streaming media player having a core and a renderer, each agent comprising: code executed in association with the streaming media player for intercepting each useful packet of a given stream as the useful packet exits the core and before the useful packet enters the renderer, wherein each useful packet has a given set of properties, wherein the properties are that the packet has not been thinned by a server, that the packet was not lost in an unrecoverable manner during transport, and that the packet arrived at the renderer in time to be useful for rendering; code for capturing a given stream quality metric from the intercepted useful packets; and code for outputting data associated with the given stream quality metric; the one or more stream monitoring computers also including a second sub-system for collecting the data from the set of monitoring agents.