Perian for Quicktime

For playing video on my Macs I have Quicktime (with Flip4Mac), Video Lan Client, and MPlayer. It’s inevitable that I’ll get an email from a friend with an attached video that Quicktime just wont play. For this I usually default to VLC, which can be prone to crashes and freezes in my experience. I have loaded plug-ins in the past, trying to make Quicktime as universal as possible but I always come across a video codec it just wont read. It seems its just too hard to know what codecs are available, and which ones are best to load.

Thats what I thought until I found Perian. Perian loads a plethora of plug-ins into Quicktime for you. I knew in the past to install 3ivx and Divx in order to play the majority of videos out there. But with Perian you get, AVI, FLV, MKV, MPEG4, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, FLV, MPEG1 (Apple charges $20 for MPEG1) & MPEG2, Fraps, Flash, and there are tons more. I tested a few FLV and MPG1 videos that hadn’t played in Quicktime before, and with Perian installed I had no problems.

Now I still need Flip4Mac, the Perian support page recommends it for watching Windows Media through Quicktime. 

Perian is a great quick solution to Quicktime’s shortcomings. In my opinion, Apple should support these in QT by default. Maybe its a licensing thing, I don’t know. Anyway, Download Perian, and your covered.