When I render anything from Poser4/5, Vue d'Esprit, Cool 3D Studio or anything else, the resulting video looks atrocious. Everything looks distorted, as though I were looking out at the world through a pane of glass that was made in 1910.

Way too impressionistic for what I originally wanted!

Steve Bell, the tech guy at e-on Software, tells me that this is due to my CPU or the codec I'm using, and has nothing to do with my graphics card.

I've tried all the codecs installed on my system, which are low-end codecs(i.e. Cinepak, Indeo 5.10, Microsoft Video 1) and all the different file formats(i.e. AVI, MPEG, etc.) and I'm still not getting better results. Any ideas?

What are you rendering deminsions and what is your framerate? What are you using to view? Can you post a copy of one of these animations?

for a test, why don't you render to a sequence of single images, check them and if they are ok, collect them in a video composing program? Then you know a lot more where the problem comes from.

Unfortunately, I am unable to post an animation on this forum because the file size is too large. If I shrink it down, it'll be too short to notice anything peculiar. Also, I tried the suggestion by wabe and got the same result as with an animation containing movement. I should also mention that rendered still images look immaculate. It's just the animations that look grainy/distorted/otherworldly.

What's your operating system? And what are the specs of your hardware?

I have a Pentium 4 1.5 GHz, ATI Radeon 9000, 512MB memory, Windows XP Home Edition.

It does indeed sound like a codec issue. Unless you render out uncompressed, the quality will always be subpar. Every windows machine should have an option for uncompressed video (usually called: none).