Abstract The aim of this paper is to describe a Quality of Service (QoS) model enabling to measure the perceptual quality of video transmissions by exploiting metrics from different layers (service, application, network) in an interoperable way. As such we are able to keep the quality experienced by the end user at a satisfactory level without cost-intensive subjective tests. Therefore, we propose a detailed QoS model for video transmission following the philosophy of the ITU-T's E-model for audio and show how this can be translated into interoperable description formats offered by the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework.