Perian

Perian is a swiss army knife for QuickTime, any OS X application that uses QuickTime can now use more additional media types.

Perian Key Features:

Basically, Perian is not a Mac App, it’s a plug-in of QuickTime components. With Perian, QuickTime works as a more powerful Video player that can handle with almost all video and audio files. This is a must-have for anyone who visits video sharing sites. Unlike VLC or Mplayer, both of which offer comparable quality playback, perian makes it all work in QuickTime. And this means it also works in all QT-compatible applications. In other words, you can now do nifty stuff such as downloading your DivX files and playing 'em in Front Row. And playback is smoooooth.

But Perian doesn’t support the popular video format WMV, WMV is Windows Media Player Video format and Windows Movie Maker video file. If you got some WMV video for playback, you can follow this guide to convert the wmv video to mov video, or use another video player for mac like VLC player to play the wmv video.

I tried out all of the file formats said on the official website in QuickTime after I installed Perian and they all work just fine. Some of them take a moment to load, but that is typical with QuickTime.

Perian Supported File Types

  • File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
  • Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
  • Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO AVI support for AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, VBR MP3 and more
  • Subtitle support for SSA/ASS, SRT, SAMI

Perian Screenshot

Perian Screenshot

How to use Perian

  • It's very easy to use Perian, after you download Perian to your Mac. mounts the Perian install file, open the .dmg file and Perian will ask you if you want to install it. Click 'yes' and Perian will install itself.
  • To use Perian, simply place it in /Library/QuickTime or ~/Library/QuickTime. It enables QuickTime application support for additional media types.
  • 1. If your tracks are all mono and the new one is stereo, convert it to mono (using the steps in the first tutorial; see page 1 here for the link to that tutorial).
  • If you want to remove Perian from your Mac, Just delete the following files:
  • ~/Library/QuickTime/Perian.component
  • ~/Library/PreferencePanes/Perian.prefPane
  • ~/Library/Preferences/org.perian.Perian.plist

Perian Overview


Basically, Perian is not a Mac App, it’s a plug-in of QuickTime components. With Perian, QuickTime works as a more powerful Video player that can handle with almost all video and audio files.

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Perian System Requirements

- Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher because 10.3 makes the iceweasel cower in fear.

Perian Review

"Perian is the best one out there. Must-have QuickTime plug-in, this kind of playback capabilities one should expect from a Mac out-of-the-box."

Holy from USA

Perian Review

"Nice find there. Perian is a great add on to QuickTime. While a VLC Player still gives you more control over what you are watching, Perian will make QuickTime worth using again, as long as you just want to watch videos with it."

Susan from USA