Many studies have been conducted to evaluate the benefits of using layered video coding schemes as a means to improve the robustness of video communications systems. In this paper, we study a frame- aware nonlinear layering scheme for the transport of a DCT-based video over packet-switched networks. This scheme takes into account the relevance of the different elements of the video sequence composing the encoded video sequence. Throughout a detailed study over a large set of video streams, we show that by properly tuning the encoding parameters, it is feasible to gracefully degrade or even maintain the video quality while reducing the amount of data representing the video sequence. We then provide the major guidelines to properly tune up the encoding parameters allowing us to set the basis towards the development of more robust video communications systems.