Objective video quality metrics play a major role in the overall design of many video applications. The quality measures are valuable because they provide video designers and standards organizations with means for making meaningful quality evaluations with-out convening viewer panels. It is well-known that simple energy based metrics such as the Peak Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) is not suitable to describe the subjective degradation perceived by a viewer. In the past years, new video quality metrics have been pro-posed in the literature that emulate human perception of video quality since produce results similar to those obtained from they subjective methods. In this paper, first we under-take a study of current trends on the definition of video quality metrics. Then, we analyze the capabilities of two representative examples of these types of new quality measures when applied to the most popular video compression standards. In particular, we are interested in applying these metrics for evaluating the quality of video streams encoded using different bit rates, size far-mats and video compression standards. For each metric we analyze the correlation between its predictions and the subjective ratings.