
That being said, I think Perian was a great piece of freeware while it lasted, and was always happy to have it on my system. I will say that I find QuickTime to be a clunky, aggravating, incredible nuisance, mitigated by Perian's capabilities, and was incredibly glad to have a stable version of VLC available.

Perian fixed that by providing the curmudgeonly QuickTime player a plugin to view these formats so that they would be transferable to a DVD. People who've been this situation are nodding their heads, remembering the frustration.
#Perian quicktime movie
A couple of burning-and-rendering hours later, you get a movie that plays fine, with no sound. iDVD is remarkably smooth to use, but heaven forfend you possess a movie that is not in a QuickTime-recognized format. Perian was and remains an incredibly helpful plugin kit, not just to view movies within QuickTime, but for more obscure purposes, such as burning moves to DVD. We'll wrap up our loose ends, pack up our bags, and move on to new and exciting projects," the Perian team wrote.

"Starting 90 days after the final Perian release, we will no longer provide support. Perian, a free open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats, is coming to an end. With these codecs installed on your MacBook Air/Pro or iMac, QuickTime is able to play its unsupported formats MKV, AVI, WMV, FLV etc.
#Perian quicktime update
In its notice to users, the team said there would be one final update that will contain fixes since the last release, but that the last update may or may not work under OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). There are many video codecs for QuickTime serving as great alternatives to Perian, such as Streambox, DivX codec, WMV codec. The software saw active support for several years after its launch, but the team felt there was only so far Perian could go. When Ars interviewed Perian lead developer Augie Fackler in 2006, he told us that Perian wasn't so much meant to replace VLC-another popular video-watching option-but rather to make it possible to watch videos natively in places like Finder previews and Front Row.

Perian made its debut in 2006 as freeware that allowed users to view a plethora of codecs that QuickTime didn't support natively, including DivX, XviD, 3viX, and FLV, with plans for both Matroska and Ogg. However, it still works with QuickTime 7.6.6. Important Note: Perian is no longer under development and does not work with QuickTime 10 or above. The Perian team posted a notice to its users this week, saying that the software is "as complete as it will ever be under our stewardship." Though we can't disagree with the team's reason for wanting to move on, Perian's retirement is a bittersweet reminder of the earlier days of Apple, when watching videos of different codecs was a challenge on the Mac. Make QuickTime play almost any video format. Perian, the "Swiss Army knife for QuickTime," has decided to cease development after six years on the market.
