What is the right technical word for the streaming video error shown below?

[smbs]

When I play streams using vlc I sometimes see the video as shown below in image. The problem exists for a few seconds and then plays fine for awhile till it happens again
I am trying to troubleshoot the the problem-what is the correct technical name for this type of problem?
What could cause this problem ie bandwidth codec video card
Any help would be great
Thanx

[Attachment 45827 - Click to enlarge]

[JVRaines]

I don't know if there is a widely-used technical term, but this artifact indicates that the decoder has missed an I-frame and is trying to construct the image from inter frames alone.

[jagabo]

It's just a corrupt picture. It could be an encoding error (hardware encoder overheated), data corruption after encoding (hard drive failure), a transmission error (lost packets), or a decoding error (incompatible decoder).

[teodz1984]

corrupt video.. bad download, bad encode, bad storage device, bad ram, bad player, bad codec, etc

[smbs]

Many thanx for all your replies--still trying to fix the problem---very annoying!!

[pandy]

You see effect of work of something called error resilience/error concealment - it is common for codec that some data can be or corrupted or missing and for both types of errors particular workaround strategy must be taken into consideration. Usually this area is not standardised/defined and it is up to implementer to create strategy - usually better codec implementations are capable to provide useful video where worse implementation just give-up and perhaps not display anything.
Usually those strategies are proprietary solutions, frequently patented as they are clear beneficial for customers.
In your case it looks like decoder displays some part of video - probably blocks are partially independent from previous frame - common situation for modern codecs where blocks may have reference in many preceding frames. Almost sure that decoding was started on non reference (non-intra) frame.