
Perian is shutting down - BenSS
http://perian.org/
======
SeoxyS
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
What are the other four things?

~~~
SeoxyS
Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox.

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

~~~
fusiongyro
It's funny. I used to use Psi, but then I switched to iChat. I used to use
Quicksilver, then I switched to Launchbar, and now I just use Spotlight. I
have Homebrew, because MacPorts can't install 3.2 of GNU Smalltalk and for no
other reason. I haven't installed Dropbox ever, or Skitch (never heard of it,
will check it out) or Divvy (I think I downloaded a demo of it once, thought
it would be cool, and never went back to buy it).

I don't know what my problem is, but I guess my need for new features keeps
diminishing. Maybe in forty years I'll finally be able to use Plan 9.

~~~
sjs
I went from LaunchBar to Quicksilver to Spotlight to LaunchBar. Can't live
without that clipboard history! I don't use many of its other features anymore
though.

Preview annotates things well enough that I never use Skitch, although Skitch
is cool if you want to use the sharing features.

You might be missing out on Dropbox. I wouldn't want to go without it these
days as I use more than one computer regularly and don't have to remember to
commit 'WIP' on a branch before I head home, I just drop the mic and get the
fuck out. YMMV.

Divvy is great. I use it w/ SizeUp every day and wouldn't want to go without
them. I don't miss xmonad at all anymore.

Other than that I install 1Password, The Unarchiver, Growl, CrashPlan, Flux,
TextMate, iTerm, and GitX and I am good to go.

I seem to shed tools as OS X improves as well, but I hope that nobody is using
plan9 in 40 years! ;-)

~~~
fusiongyro
Agree on TextMate. Haven't heard of most of the other stuff. I used Xmonad for
about six months, then I basically copied the keybindings into an fvwm config,
then I switched to KDE, brought over a handful of the keybindings and I seem
to be alright.

I would probably use Dropbox if I didn't have a VM. A friend has been trying
to get me to use one of their competitors for a while.

Plan 9 is great, just a bit too much ideology to actually get anything done. I
hope it's still maintained in 40 years in case I do go that way. :)

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X-Istence
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.

~~~
thristian
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).

~~~
Schlaefer
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.

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kschults
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
>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.

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filmgirlcw
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.

~~~
zbowling
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.

~~~
filmgirlcw
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.

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WiseWeasel
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.

~~~
Stokestack
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
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/>

~~~
Stokestack
Interesting. Thanks.

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gurkendoktor
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.

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victorlamhk
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.....

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Feoh
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.

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amanuel
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.

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

~~~
breidh
There's MPlayer...

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

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

~~~
Groxx
Which has taken over Perian / VLC almost entirely, for me. Perian has been
utterly fantastic, a near ideal passive improvement for everything, but
MPlayer smokes everything in performance.

