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 sof ...
QuickTime component that enabled
Apple Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
’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 avai ...
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) syste ...
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 lapt ...
.
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 use ...
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: Microsoft W ...
,
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, worl ...
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 cosine tr ...
* MS-MPEG4 v1, v2 and v3
*
H.263
*
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 throughout ...
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
Asao (also known as Nellymoser audio codec) is a proprietary single-channel (mono) codec and compression format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of audio, developed by Nellymoser Inc.
Technical Details
Sound data is grouped into frames o ...
*
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 lossy ...
*
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 sponsored ...
/
VP8
VP8 is an open and royalty-free video compression format released by On2 Technologies in 2008.
Initially released as a proprietary successor to On2's previous VP7 format, VP8 was released as an open and royalty-free format in May 2010 after Goo ...
*
FFV1
FFV1 (short for FF Video 1) is a lossless intra-frame video coding format. It can use either variable-length coding or arithmetic coding for entropy coding. The encoder and decoder are part of the free, open-source library libavcodec in the pr ...
*
Theora
Theora is a free file format, free Lossy compression, 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 ...
Subtitle support for the following:
* (Advanced)
SubStation Alpha
SubStation Alpha (or Sub Station Alpha), abbreviated SSA, is a Subtitle (captioning), subtitle file format created by CS Low (also known as Kotus) that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SubRip, SRT and similar formats. It i ...
*
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 net ...
*
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 t ...
file format
*
NUV file format
*
Matroska
Matroska 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 AVI, MP4, or Adva ...
(MKV)
See also
*
Windows Media Components for QuickTime
Windows Media Components for QuickTime, also known as Flip4Mac WMV Player by Telestream, Inc. was one of the few commercial products that allow playback of Microsoft's proprietary audio and video codecs inside QuickTime for macOS.
It allowed pl ...
*
Xiph QuickTime Components
Xiph.Org Foundation is a nonprofit organization that produces free multimedia formats and software tools. It focuses on the Ogg family of formats, the most successful of which has been Vorbis, an open and freely licensed audio format and codec d ...
*
Combined Community Codec Pack
The Combined Community Codec Pack, more commonly referred to by its acronym CCCP, was a collection of codecs (video compression filters) packed for Microsoft Windows, designed originally for the playback of anime fansubs. The CCCP was developed an ...
(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