Perian was an
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
QuickTime component that enabled
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, in Silicon Valley. It is best known for its consumer electronics, software, and services. Founded in 1976 as Apple Comput ...
’s
QuickTime
QuickTime (or QuickTime Player) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term ''QuickTime'' also refers to the QuickTime Pla ...
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, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...
.
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 vide ...
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 use ...
and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska.
Before it was discontinued, it was featured as the "Download of the Day" on
Lifehacker
''Lifehacker'' is a weblog about life hacks and software that launched on 31 January 2005. The site was originally launched by Gawker Media and is owned by Ziff Davis. The blog posts cover a wide range of topics including Microsoft Windows, M ...
,
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, sci ...
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 International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC 14496-2) is a video encoding specification designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It belongs to ...
* MS-MPEG4 v1, v2 and v3
*
H.263
*
H.264
*
Flash Screen Video
*
Truemotion VP6 & VP3
*
HuffYUV
* Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska)
*
Snow
Snow consists of 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 througho ...
wavelet video
*
DOSBox
DOSBox is a free and open-source MS-DOS emulator. It supports running programs primarily video games that are otherwise inaccessible since hardware for running a compatible disk operating system (DOS) is obsolete and generally unavailab ...
video
*
DTS Coherent Acoustics audio
*
Nellymoser Asao Codec
*
Windows Media Audio (WMA) v1 & v21
*
Dolby Digital
Dolby Digital, originally synonymous with Dolby AC-3 (see below), is the name for a family of audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. Called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1995, it is lossy compression (except for Dolby Tr ...
*
Fraps
*
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 HTML video and the HTML audio elements. It has a sister project, WebP, for images. The development of the format is sponsored by ...
/
VP8
VP8 is an open format, open and royalty-free Video coding format, video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
Initially released as a Proprietary software, proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released a ...
*
FFV1
*
Theora
Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It was 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 contai ...
Subtitle support for the following:
* (Advanced)
SubStation Alpha
*
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 ne ...
*
VobSub
Container format support for the following:
*
FLV file format
*
NUV file format
*
Matroska
Matroska (styled Matroška) is a project to create a container format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture, or subtitle tracks in one file. The Matroska Multimedia Container is similar in concept to other containers like ...
(MKV)
See also
*
Windows Media Components for QuickTime
*
Xiph QuickTime Components
*
Combined Community Codec Pack (a similar bundle for Windows)
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