The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 9 out of 10]
- Developer: The Perian Project/ Product page
- Price: Free (Open Source)
One frustrating aspect of life as a Mac user is the bewildering array of semi-compatible video formats we encounter on a near daily basis. Some seem to play in QuickTime, others require VideoLan Client or mPlayer or FLV Player, while others require finding, downloading, and installing some obscure third-party QuickTime codec. If you're lucky, all the stars align and you're able to play your video back with QuickTime. If you're not lucky, you wind up cursing the encoder gods and perhaps launching Windows XP in Parallels to see if you have any better luck there.
Enter Perian. Although it's very early in this product's life cycle, I'm already impressed. As seen on their home page, Perian's goal is to become the Swiss army knife of video codecs for QuickTime. Download the package and drag the QuickTime component to the Library -> QuickTime folder of your choice: your user's Library (so it's just for you) or the top-level Library (for everyone on the machine). Restart any apps that use QuickTime (QuickTime Player, iTunes, your browser, etc.), and you're done.
You'll find that QuickTime can now magically handle a diverse array of additonal video formats: Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6, and these formats when they are inside an AVI file -- h.264, mpeg4, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3. And yes, I ripped that list right off their website.
Combine Perian with Flip4Mac (for Windows Media files), and you've got as close to a Rosetta Stone for Mac video playback as we've ever had. In the short time I've had it installed, I've been impressed with how well it's worked -- I no longer have to think about what player I might have to use for a given clip; they all just open in QuickTime.
Note: Periand requires 10.4.7 or newer...

