Motion information is an important cue for human to perceive video content. However, it is hard to use motion in video retrieval due to the lack of effective representation. In this paper, we propose a perceived motion based shot content representation, perceived motion energy spectrum (PMES), for content-based video retrieval. The human perceivable motion regions or objects can be detected directly from this representation. In order to extract PMES images from motion vectors in MPEG stream, a temporal energy filter and a global motion filter have been designed. The experimental results show that PMES image improves the performance of motion based video retrieval effectively.