Perian - A swiss-army knife for QuickTime

Originally downloaded 9/30/06. Perian is an open source project that extends the range of QuickTime to cover more video formats. You’ll still need Flip4Mac to play Windows Media files, but Perian has you covered on most other types that QuickTime doesn’t handle natively. I haven’t tried it yet, but will definitely recommend if it works.

Update 11/27/06. Yup! It works just fine alright. My son just ran into an AVI movie that wouldn’t play. I upgraded Flip4Mac on his Intel iMac, but of course Flip4Mac doesn’t really help with AVI files. Then I remembered Perian… downloaded and installed it on his machine, and the AVI movie actually played, audio and video both! I don’t have occasion to use AVI movies much, but I’m taking this as testimony that Perian works as advertised. Next, I’m going to take the Perian developers’ advice and remove older QuickTime components that Perian effectively replaces, to ensure there are no conflicts in loading certain video types.

Version as tested: 0.5.