This issue has been around for years at this point, but I'm reaching that point of need.  I received some dvcproHD files from a client who used a Mac.  Of course, I cannot play them in Quicktime.  So i downloaded Raylight and it works, like everyone says.

I didn't transcode anything, but I noticed that in the Quicktime Movie Inspector it replaces "Apple DVCPRO HD" with "Raylight DVCPRO HD".

  Now, I don't understand what makes the raylight codec so special so that we can open these files in Windows, but what stops Avid from allowing us to open these same files as "Avid DV100" files in Quicktime, so that I don't need to pay $100 dollars to some company I have never heard of to do it.

I would even rather pay Avid $100 dollars to just open up these files in Quicktime.

Apple don't make all of their codecs available to the PC world, so obviously Raylight is doing something to change things whether you're aware of it or not.  It may simply be changing the QT header to refer to their own codec, but it's definitely doing something.

No, it does not seem to change anything in the file.  If I open the file through shared storage at the same time, the computer with Raylight says its the "Raylight dvcpro HD" codec, and the computer without the raylight codec installed still says its apple dvcproHD