Many approaches have been proposed recently for estimating the perceived fidelity of digitally compressed and reconstructed video clips. Several metrics rely on the accurate estimation of detection thresholds, basically assuming that perceived quality depends significantly on the error threshold. To test that assumption, we designed an experiment to measure the actual detection threshold of some MPEG-2 artifacts in typical video sequences. In each of the test clips, we briefly replaced a region with a test stimulus created using an MPEG-2 encoder. The location,time,and strength of the artifact were varied between test videos.At the end of each clip, each subject provided a detection response and, for the detected artifacts, location and annoyance information. From the data, we determined the detection threshold for each artifact.Using the thresholds, we computed a perceptually weighted error metric. In this paper, we describe the experiment in more detail, summarize the experimental results including the threshold calculations, and compare the weighted error measure to the output of a commercial fidelity metric. Finally, we discuss our conclusions on the validity of predicting quality from threshold measurements.