As many long-time users of Apple QuickTime-based digital video editing products noted in a Macintouch reader report, Apple's DV codec shipped with QuickTime 4.1 for the Mac, was deeply flawed and products that relied on it to produce high-quality output of titles, transitions, and motion graphics suffered noticeably from its limitations. Unfortunately, it appears to be Apple's policy to expunge reports of problems with this product from the Apple Technical Exchange discussion boards, so the problem was not widely known and solutions were rarely discussed.
As it turned out, the artifacts in the Apple DV codec were caused by the Altivec-optimized code in QuickTime 4.1. This problem only occurred on G4s and only with certain versions of the QuickTime FireWire DV Enabler and QuickTime FireWire DV Support extensions. Users reported that the Enabler and Support extensions from QT 4.0.3 provided superior results (downgrading to a G3 is, of course, not an ideal solution for G4 owners.)
Fortunately, Apple finally addressed the issue in June 2000, when version 1.2.5 of Final Cut Pro was released with a new DV codec that fixed luminance clamping issues and eliminated the YUV-RGB conversion that caused image degradation.
Apple integrated this codec into QuickTime version 5.0 and later releases. There are also other solutions. Users of MotoDV from Radius (now sold by Digital Origin) have a superior codec called SoftDV that ships with that product.
Users of the DVPlus codec from Promax (as found in the company's DVToolkit) also report good results, although as noted by Adam Wilt, its claims of "no quality loss" are overstated.
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