Perian is a discontinued

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

QuickTime component that enabled Apple Inc.’s

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

to play several popular

video formats Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) system ...

not supported natively by QuickTime on

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

. It was a joint development of several earlier open source components based on the multiplatform

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

project's

libavcodec libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. libavcodec is an integral part of many open-source multimedia applications and frameworks. The popular MPV, xine and VLC media players u ...

and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska. It has been featured as the "Download of the Day" on

Lifehacker ''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on January 31, 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is currently owned by G/O Media. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including: Microso ...

, as well as on several popular blogs including

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sc ...

and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Project shutdown

On 15 May 2012, the Perian project managers announced on their website that they are shutting down support for the project. In the announcement, they recommended that users look to other products, such as Niceplayer, VLC or MPlayer OS X. They indicated that Perian's source code would be posted online for any developer who wanted to continue with the project. One continuation based on the source code is actively maintained but does not support QuickTime for

OS X Mavericks OS X Mavericks (version 10.9) is the 10th major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. OS X Mavericks was announced on June 10, 2013, at WWDC 2013, and was released on October 22, 2013, wo ...

or later.

Supported formats

Perian lent support for many combinations of video, audio, text, and container formats to QuickTime, including the following: AV codec support for the following: *

MPEG-4 Part 2 MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual (formally ISO/IEC 14496-2) is a video compression format developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It uses block-wise motion compensation and a discrete cosi ...

* MS-MPEG4 v1, v2 and v3 *

H.263 H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bit-rate compressed format for videotelephony. It was standardized by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) in a project ending in 1995/1996. It is a member of the H.26x fam ...

H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...

* Flash Screen Video * Truemotion VP6 & VP3 * HuffYUV * Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska) *

Snow Snow comprises individual ice crystals that grow while suspended in the atmosphere—usually within clouds—and then fall, accumulating on the ground where they undergo further changes. It consists of frozen crystalline water throughou ...

wavelet video *

DOSBox DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games i ...

video *

DTS Coherent Acoustics DTS, Inc. (originally Digital Theater Systems) is an American company that makes multichannel audio technologies for film and video. Based in Calabasas, California, the company introduced its DTS technology in 1993 as a competitor to Dolby Labor ...

audio * Nellymoser Asao Codec * Windows Media Audio (WMA) v1 & v21 *

Dolby Digital Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3, is the name for what has now become a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Formerly named Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, the audio compression is loss ...

Fraps Fraps (derived from frames per second) is a benchmarking, screen capture and screen recording utility for Windows developed by Beepa. It can capture from software that uses DirectX and OpenGL, such as PC games. Operation Fraps is proprietary ...

* Indeo 2, 3 and 5 *

WebM WebM is an audiovisual media file format. It is primarily intended to offer a royalty-free alternative to use in the HTML5 video and the HTML5 audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponso ...

/ VP8 * FFV1 *

Theora Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container ...

Subtitle support for the following: * (Advanced)

SubStation Alpha SubStation Alpha (or Sub Station Alpha), abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by CS Low (also known as Kotus) that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. It is also the name of the popula ...

* SRT *

SAMI Acronyms * SAMI, ''Synchronized Accessible Media Interchange'', a closed-captioning format developed by Microsoft * Saudi Arabian Military Industries, a government-owned defence company * South African Malaria Initiative, a virtual expertise ...

VobSub DirectVobSub (formerly known as VSFilter) is a software add-on for Microsoft Windows (a DirectShow filter) that is able to read external subtitle files and superimposes them on a playing video file. DirectVobSub/VSFilter were formerly part of ...

Container format support for the following: *

FLV Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There are ...

file format * NUV file format * Matroska (MKV)

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://www.perian.org, Perian – official site QuickTime Free video codecs Free media players MacOS media players MacOS-only free software

Project shutdown

Supported formats

See also

References

External links