Perian, the six-year old play-anything video package for the Mac, is about to be retired. It won’t be taken out round the back of the farm, forced to stand by an old bathtub and then shot in the back of the head and sprinkled with lime, but it’s close — the project will be donated to the open-source community.
Perian is a neat package of video codecs that is installed with one click as a prefpane. Once there, it lets you play back movies in pretty much any format, anywhere on your Mac. Even the Finder uses it to show QuickLook previews when you hit the spacebar.
For these reasons, Perian has long been one of the first things I install on a new Mac.
For playing movies, this isn’t really a big deal, as you can just open them in something like VLC. The real problem comes when you see the amount of apps that rely on Perian to do their dirty work. The excellent iFlicks, for example, uses Perian to allow it to transcode movies to watch later on your iPad or in iTunes.
The Perian team’s suggestion is to use Niceplayer, but this is a playback app and really not the same thing. Still, hopefully the developers of other apps that use Perian will contribute to the open-source project and keep things alive.
So, farewell and thanks, Perian folks. And good luck with whatever you do next.
Source: Perian
Via: MacStories
