VALIDATING FRAME DEPENDENCY INFORMATION

The operation of a video playback application supporting display of an encoded video may be validated using a special-purpose video decoder. The decoder compares pre-determined indications of dependency frames for frames of the video with dependency frames that are identified based on an order in which the frames are provided to the decoder. Based on the comparison, the decoder verifies that the frames may be decoded with correct dependencies. In one implementation, a frame of a video is accessed. A first description and a second description identifying frames of the video upon which decoding of the accessed frame depends are accessed. The first description is compared to the second description, and whether the first and second descriptions identify a common set of frames is determined based on the identifying.