YV12 QuickTime Codec 1.0a2 probably won't be all that useful to anyone who isn't involved in developing image processing or compression/decompression software. YV12 is a planar Y'CbCr 4:2:0 image format, and is often used as an intermediate format by reference codecs such as the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 video decoder reference code.

It's not a very good choice for end users, because it doesn't really compress video that much, and it stores pixel data in a manner that's not particularly convenient for playback.

That said, you might find this codec useful if you're a developer working in image processing. As mentioned above, YV12 is a planar format, meaning that for each image, the luma data for all pixels is stored consecutively, followed by the chroma data - this method of accessing pixel components is convenient for many image processing techniques.