7 ms·

Perian is shutting down

212 points by BenSS 14y ago

SeoxyS 14y ago
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 14y ago
  What are the other four things?
  - pudquick 14y ago
    Well, two of them are probably VLC and The Unarchiver.
    - johnpowell 14y ago
      First thing I install is Little Snitch.
      - sa1f 14y ago
        I find Radio Silence to be cleaner. http://radiosilenceapp.com/ http://radiosilenceapp.com/ Only 9 bucks.
        Stokestack 14y ago
        Except, from what I can tell, there's no way to have it alert you when applications try to call out. So you have to know in advance which applications you want to block, and specify them manually. Also, if the app you want to block calls out during installation, it's too late.
        Mohnican 14y ago
        Hands Off! Is another great tool.
  - SeoxyS 14y ago
    Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox. Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.
    - acangiano 14y ago
      I prefer Alfred over Quicksilver, and Window Magnet instead of Divvy. Just in case someone is interested in alternatives.
    - fusiongyro 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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 14y ago
        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. :)
filmgirlcw 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.
  - BenSS 14y ago
    Aha, thank you for that tidbit of information. That explains why converting with QT took two hours for a particular file format, and I re-did the same thing with Handbrake in 20 minutes.
  - filmgirlcw 14y ago
    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.
- ye-olde-taper 14y ago
  The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?
kschults 14y ago
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 14y ago
  >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.
- atlbeer 14y ago
  I optd opt of the beta due to this reason and mentally filed it under "WebM performs poorly" Thank you for appropriately assigning the root cause. I would have never linked the two.
WiseWeasel 14y ago
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.
- xymostech 14y ago
  This is about how I feel also. I use MPlayer when I need to watch a movie, VLC when I need to play anything weird (like streams or anything).
- Stokestack 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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/ http://www.mplayerosx.ch/ [2]: http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list [3]: https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/ https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/
    - Stokestack 14y ago
      Interesting. Thanks.
  - duomo 14y ago
    Actually, VLC can still display a separate playlist and playback window. You just need to uncheck "Show video within the main window" in the Preferences. http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac has some other tips for making things look more like they do in 1.x.
X-Istence 14y ago
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.
- notJim 14y ago
  I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.
  - zbowling 14y ago
    what? no... Accelerate.framework is available to everyone.
    - Zev 14y ago
      Eh? AFAIK, Accelerate.framework doesn't do anything with the GPU -- its "just" a set of highly optimized functions for math/DSP/image processing operations.
      - zbowling 14y ago
        It does. Specifically the vImage part.
        astrange 14y ago
        vImage is not GPU accelerated and provides no useful operations for decoding video. You may be thinking of OpenCL, which also provides no useful operations for decoding video, or VideoDecodeAcceleration, which is already supported by QuickTime and needs no further 3rd party support.
kylebrown 14y ago
never used perian before. seems vlc (also built on ffmpeg of course) is the only major open source media player out there.
- breidh 14y ago
  There's MPlayer... http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
  - hackermom 14y ago
    And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/ http://mplayerx.org/
    - Groxx 14y ago
      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.
    - thetinguy 14y ago
      I find mplayerx extended better: http://www.mplayerosx.ch/ http://www.mplayerosx.ch/
- ye-olde-taper 14y ago
  It might "seem" that way. But as others have pointed out, there is indeed another major open source media player. At what point did VLC start using the ffmpeg libraries? If I'm not mistaken mplayer has used them since its inception.
- tyler_ball 14y ago
  I love movist. http://code.google.com/p/movist/ http://code.google.com/p/movist/
victorlamhk 14y ago
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.....
gurkendoktor 14y ago
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.
Feoh 14y ago
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.
amanuel 14y ago
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.

212 points by BenSS 14y ago

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 14y ago
What are the other four things?
- pudquick 14y ago
  Well, two of them are probably VLC and The Unarchiver.
  - johnpowell 14y ago
    First thing I install is Little Snitch.
    - sa1f 14y ago
      I find Radio Silence to be cleaner. http://radiosilenceapp.com/ http://radiosilenceapp.com/ Only 9 bucks.
      - Stokestack 14y ago
        Except, from what I can tell, there's no way to have it alert you when applications try to call out. So you have to know in advance which applications you want to block, and specify them manually. Also, if the app you want to block calls out during installation, it's too late.
        Mohnican 14y ago
        Hands Off! Is another great tool.
- SeoxyS 14y ago
  Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox. Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.
  - acangiano 14y ago
    I prefer Alfred over Quicksilver, and Window Magnet instead of Divvy. Just in case someone is interested in alternatives.
  - fusiongyro 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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. :)

filmgirlcw 14y ago

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 14y ago
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.
- BenSS 14y ago
  Aha, thank you for that tidbit of information. That explains why converting with QT took two hours for a particular file format, and I re-did the same thing with Handbrake in 20 minutes.
- filmgirlcw 14y ago
  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.
ye-olde-taper 14y ago
The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?

kschults 14y ago

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 14y ago
>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.
atlbeer 14y ago
I optd opt of the beta due to this reason and mentally filed it under "WebM performs poorly" Thank you for appropriately assigning the root cause. I would have never linked the two.

WiseWeasel 14y ago

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.

xymostech 14y ago
This is about how I feel also. I use MPlayer when I need to watch a movie, VLC when I need to play anything weird (like streams or anything).
Stokestack 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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/ http://www.mplayerosx.ch/ [2]: http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list [3]: https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/ https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/
  - Stokestack 14y ago
    Interesting. Thanks.
- duomo 14y ago
  Actually, VLC can still display a separate playlist and playback window. You just need to uncheck "Show video within the main window" in the Preferences. http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac http://feepk.net/customizing-vlc-for-mac has some other tips for making things look more like they do in 1.x.

X-Istence 14y ago

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.

notJim 14y ago
I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.
- zbowling 14y ago
  what? no... Accelerate.framework is available to everyone.
  - Zev 14y ago
    Eh? AFAIK, Accelerate.framework doesn't do anything with the GPU -- its "just" a set of highly optimized functions for math/DSP/image processing operations.
    - zbowling 14y ago
      It does. Specifically the vImage part.
      - astrange 14y ago
        vImage is not GPU accelerated and provides no useful operations for decoding video. You may be thinking of OpenCL, which also provides no useful operations for decoding video, or VideoDecodeAcceleration, which is already supported by QuickTime and needs no further 3rd party support.

kylebrown 14y ago

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

breidh 14y ago
There's MPlayer... http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
- hackermom 14y ago
  And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/ http://mplayerx.org/
  - Groxx 14y ago
    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.
  - thetinguy 14y ago
    I find mplayerx extended better: http://www.mplayerosx.ch/ http://www.mplayerosx.ch/
ye-olde-taper 14y ago
It might "seem" that way. But as others have pointed out, there is indeed another major open source media player. At what point did VLC start using the ffmpeg libraries? If I'm not mistaken mplayer has used them since its inception.
tyler_ball 14y ago
I love movist. http://code.google.com/p/movist/ http://code.google.com/p/movist/

victorlamhk 14y ago

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.....

gurkendoktor 14y ago

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.

Feoh 14y ago

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.

amanuel 14y ago

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.