Perian For Mac

Perian is a powerful and useful QuickTime component specially made to expand the range of video file formats supported by Apple’s QuickTime player.

Perian is distributed via a lightweight DMG disk image that you need to mount in order to gain access to the prefPane and Read Me file. To begin the installation process you just have to double click on the Perian.prefPane icon and decide whether you want to install Perian only for the current user or for all existing users.

It is worth mentioning that Perian uses multiple third-party libraries such as libavcodec, libavformat, libmatroska, liba52 and Mozilla’s Universal Charset Detector. The above mentioned Read Me file provides detailed information about all used libraries.

From Perian’s pref pane window you can easily check the status of the currently installed version, check for updates and customize the audio output. Hence, you can change the audio output from Stereo to Dolby Pro Logic, Dolby Pro Logic II or Multi-Channel Output.

Perian allows you to play soft sounds normally or louder. More demanding users can use the third option that enables them to adjust the Dynamic Range Compression value according to their needs.

Moreover, Perian is capable to improve the subtitle support and load external subtitles like SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI, VobSub or SubStation Alpha. Thanks to Perian you can also enjoy AVI, MKV, DIVX, FLV, VP6, VFW or GVI video files.

The list of supported video types range from H.264, MPEG1 and MPEG2 to DosBox Capture, DivX, MS-MPEG, 3ivx, Sorenson H.263, FLV, FSV1, VP5, 3 and 8, HUff YUV, Snow and more. At the same time, Perian offers support for the following audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 and v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (Matroska), MPEG Layer I and II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics and Nellymoser ASAO.

Although you can still download Perian, the project is no longer supported. Developers can use Perian’s source code if they want to further develop the project while Mac users can turn to VLC, MPlayer OSX or Niceplayer to play file formats that are not natively supported by Mac OS X.