Perian is shutting down

by BenSS • 14 years ago

212 63 14 years ago

SeoxyS4• 14 years ago

I will be really sad to see it go. Perian is one of the first five things I download when I'm on a clean install of OS X. Support has sadly been lagging when it comes to MKV, and for that I still keep VideoLan around; but otherwise I love having full system-wide QuickTime support for all common video formats (AVI).

peter_l_downs• 14 years ago

What are the other four things?

pudquick• 14 years ago

Well, two of them are probably VLC and The Unarchiver.

SeoxyS4• 14 years ago

Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox.

Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.

filmgirlcw3• 14 years ago

It's a shame, but I hope some other devs consider picking up development where the Perian guys left off. Perian is one of my favorite Mac utilities because I love using QuickTime for everything when possible.

To the team, thanks for all your years of hard work and best of luck on future projects.

zbowling3• 14 years ago

It's not so much an issue of picking up Perian in that the new Quicktime 10 API doesn't work anything like the old Quicktime API.

Perian just made open source codecs work with Quicktime's API. Quicktime X however demands much more that makes it impossible to do without rewriting all the codecs. Those same codecs are directly embedded in other players (like VLC) so it's not a big issue. Quicktime X is pushing towards hardware acceleration, better battery life (with a few tricks), and multicore processing that the old model just doesn't work with.

Right now when you run older codecs, Quicktime X actually runs a little host process in 32bit that actually does the decoding using a fork of the old Quicktime 7 code. Native codecs run in 64bit using multiple cores and hardware acceleration.

BenSS• 14 years ago

Aha, thank you for that tidbit of information. That explains why converting with QT took two hours for a particular file format, and I re-did the same thing with Handbrake in 20 minutes.

filmgirlcw3• 14 years ago

Indeed -- I actually meant developers interested in doing native 64-bit codecs, assuming there would be advantages. In truth, having hardware optimized support would be ideal, but the reality is that H.264 is quickly becoming the dominant codec, even in the HD space, that it might be a moot point.

ye-olde-taper2• 14 years ago

The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?

filmgirlcw3• 14 years ago

Eventually. There is too much legacy code that runs on QT for it to deprecate now, but QT 7 was really the last full version. QT X has drastically reduced dev access to tools and as more media handling becomes browser centric and H.264 based, it isn't likely to go much further.

Stokestack4• 14 years ago

Let's hope so.

kschults• 14 years ago

Best of luck to the whole team there. It's such a great tool, and seamlessly pulled off. I'll be sad to see it go, and I'll be crossing my fingers in the hopes that it will work with future OS releases for a while.

mistercow• 14 years ago

>I'll be sad to see it go, and I'll be crossing my fingers in the hopes that it will work with future OS releases for a while.

Given that Apple has seemed to feel, for the last few OS releases, that it's acceptable for "deprecate" and "break" to happen in the same step, I wouldn't get my hopes up.

atlbeer• 14 years ago

I optd opt of the beta due to this reason and mentally filed it under "WebM performs poorly"

Thank you for appropriately assigning the root cause. I would have never linked the two.

WiseWeasel• 14 years ago

I used this at one point, but long ago switched to MPlayerOSX, finding it a much more straightforward interface for playing random format movies than QT, with noticeably better performance. VLC is also... an option.

xymostech• 14 years ago

This is about how I feel also. I use MPlayer when I need to watch a movie, VLC when I need to play anything weird (like streams or anything).

Stokestack4• 14 years ago

MPlayer lacks a playlist though, which is annoying.

VLC's recent UI changes have been a step backward (specifically making it impossible to see the playlist and the video at the same time), but at least you can queue things up to play.

sirn• 14 years ago

MPlayer OSX Extended[1] is your friend. It has playlist, it has nice interface and you could swap out MPlayer player binary with a newer one (e.g. mplayer2-git[2] or build your own via Homebrew[3]). I like MPlayer OSX Extended far more than MPlayerX or any other alternatives, shame that it didn't get the attention it deserves.

[1] http://www.mplayerosx.ch/

[2] http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list

[3] https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/

duomo• 14 years ago

Actually, VLC can still display a separate playlist and playback window. You just need to uncheck "Show video within the main window" in the Preferences. http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac has some other tips for making things look more like they do in 1.x.

X-Istence3• 14 years ago

This is a shame. I absolutely love Perian and it has made it much easier to just play content without having to download VLC as well, and it just worked.

One thing I have noticed is that support for MKV/VP8/WebM has always been pretty bad. It uses a LOT of CPU time and in general was really slow. When YouTube put me in the HTML 5 beta it was unbeknownst to me sending me WebM content because I had Perian installed and it was causing HUGE spikes in CPU usage and overall lag because it was trying to decode and render WebM, whereas h264 requires almost no CPU power on my older MBP.

I hope that the community as a whole picks up the project and helps it succeed, it would be fantastic to still have it around.

notJim• 14 years ago

I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.

zbowling3• 14 years ago

what? no... Accelerate.framework is available to everyone.

Zev2• 14 years ago

Apple has provided the "Video Decode Acceleration Framework" for Mac OS X since 10.6.3: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/_in...

thristian• 14 years ago

Under the heading "Frequently Asked Questions" on the linked page, it says:

Why does it take so long for MKV to load?

QuickTime expects to know the location of every single frame in a movie in order to play it. This is easy with its native format, MOV/MP4, but more difficult for several others, including MKV. Perian has to read in the entire file in order for seeking and playback to work.

That's probably (part of) the reason MKV and WebM are slow for you (since WebM uses the MKV container format).

Schlaefer2• 14 years ago

A symptom of this issue is that you have to wait before you can start playing the movie. So if you wanted to play a 1 GB mkv the player had to read the whole 1 GB from disc once, which took a fair amount of time back in the days.

Afaik playback performance is not affected by this. Poor playback performance is mainly related to the lack of hardware acceleration (and codec optimizations) people take for granted since h.264 matured on OS X.

X-Istence3• 14 years ago

No, it is extremely slow and laggy AFTER I've downloaded the full content from the web!

Schlaefer2• 14 years ago

Performance and the youtube issues aside: afaik Perian is the only easy option to add WebM support to Safari.

Are there any alternatives?

X-Istence3• 14 years ago

Perian is even recommended by Google on their WebM page when you start looking for a way to get WebM content on Mac OS X.

kylebrown• 14 years ago

never used perian before. seems vlc (also built on ffmpeg of course) is the only major open source media player out there.

breidh• 14 years ago

There's MPlayer...

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

hackermom• 14 years ago

And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/

ye-olde-taper2• 14 years ago

It might "seem" that way.

But as others have pointed out, there is indeed another major open source media player.

At what point did VLC start using the ffmpeg libraries?

If I'm not mistaken mplayer has used them since its inception.

tyler_ball• 14 years ago

I love movist. http://code.google.com/p/movist/

victorlamhk• 14 years ago

It's really sad. I installed it because Quicktime and iPhoto can't play any video taken from my Canon digital camera. Perian provided system-wide Quicktime support for many video format and this is what VLC or MPlayer cannot compare.....

gurkendoktor2• 14 years ago

Perian used to be me first download on every Mac, but 10.7 does not let me hide the file preview (top right) in column view anymore. If I scroll through a list of video files and hit something complicated (like MKV) the Finder just hangs. Has this bothered anyone else? Or is detail view more common in the wild?

I love the VLC redesign though, and it arrived just in time, so I'm happy.

Feoh• 14 years ago

Interesting thread. I too am truly sad to see this go, while everyone is suggesting stand alone players, I personally loved that Perian actually extended the native tools to support all these other formats.

amanuel• 14 years ago

Perian has been the first thing I install on every mac I own/use.

A sad day.

Perian team, great job guys and thanks for the many years of awesomeness.

Perian is shutting down

Related Stories