This paper proposes a general framework to evaluate and compare several temporal video segmentation algorithms. The problems that must be solved to confront different methods summarize as gathering a common content set to test the methods, building a reference segmentation, establishing the rules to match the results with the reference, and providing a quality measure. Some solutions to these problems are given in this study and are applied for evaluating different methods developed in various contexts. The paper concludes by presenting results obtained on practical tests. This study was made by a work group of AIM (Multimedia Indexation Action) Working Group 10 of the ISIS Coordinated Research Program.