Playback/display YUV video file

I was trying to play a YUV file (e.g. the foreman.yuv clip from somewhere like here, or here) - the simplest way seems to be to get mplayer and run it like this (note the -rawvideo option indicates the file format - see mplayer man page for more info):
mplayer foreman.yuv -demuxer rawvideo -rawvideo cif

Or you can use Gstreamer (available for Linux, Windows, and OSX, though there's a problem using autovideosink on the cmd line on the Mac) like this:
gst-launch filesrc location=foreman.yuv ! videoparse width=352 height=288 framerate=25/1 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! autovideosink

You'll obviously need to change the resolution and potentially framerate for different video samples but these work with 'foreman' clip.

BTW if you want to compute the PSNR between two YUV files you can use ffmpeg's tiny_psnr utility like so:
tiny_psnr foreman.yuv foreman-mangled.yuv