When comparing the performance of video coding approaches, evaluating different commercial video encoders, or measuring the perceived video quality in a wireless environment, Rate/distortion analysis is commonly used, where distortion is usually measured in terms of PSNR values. However, PSNR does not always capture the distortion perceived by a human being. As a consequence, significant efforts have focused on defining an objective video quality metric that is able to assess quality in the same way as a human does. We perform a study of some available objective quality assessment metrics in order to evaluate their behavior in two different scenarios. First, we deal with video sequences compressed by different encoders at different bitrates in order to properly measure the video quality degradation associated with the encoding system. In addition, we evaluate the behavior of the quality metrics when measuring video distortions produced by packet losses in mobile ad hoc network scenarios with variable degrees of network congestion and node mobility. Our purpose is to determine if the analyzed metrics can replace the PSNR while comparing, designing, and evaluating video codec proposals, and, in particular, under video delivery scenarios characterized by bursty and frequent packet losses, such as wireless multihop environments.