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