Quicktime Perian

How to Use Perian for Quicktime to play FLV, MKV, AVI, etc. on Mac OS X

As a Mac user, one frustrating aspect of life is the bewildering array of semi-compatible video formats such as AVI, FLV, and MKV that make enjoying movies a daily challenge.

QuickTime, for example, only supports a few video formats such as H.264 and MPEG-4 out of the box. The problem is, a lot of video files out there are still encoded using DivX or XviD. Maybe you also have some old WMV-encoded files you'd like to play.

So, some of your videos will play in QuickTime, like AVI format, while others require VideoLan Client or mPlayer or FLV Player. One way to play all your videos in QuickTime is to re-encode all of these files to H.264 using this Video Converter for Mac (Mac OS X Lion included).

Perian

Perian's goal is to become the Swiss army knife of video codecs for QuickTime. With Mac Perian installed, you should be able to play everything from DivX/AC3 to FLV to VBR/MP3. Perian codec is open-source and you can take the Perain download here.

Install and use Perian for Mac

Download the package and drag the QuickTime component to the Library -> QuickTime folder of your choice: your user library (so it's just for you) or the top-level Library (for everyone on the machine).

Restart any apps that use QuickTime (QuickTime Player, iTunes, your browser, etc.), and you're done.

Note: You can drag the QuickTime component to the Library -> QuickTime folder of your choice: your user's Library (so it's just for you) or the top-level Library (for everyone on the machine).

You'll find that QuickTime can now magically handles a diverse array of additional video formats: FLV, AVI, DivX, DivX 3.11 alpha, XviD, 3ivX, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, and these formats when they are inside an AVI file -- mpeg4, h.264, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3.

Perian is quite nice because everything "just works" right out of the box. The problem is that Mac Perian provides somewhat sub-par quality compared to getting the codecs direct from the source. So, as nice as just using Perian would be, quality lovers will have to forego the convenience. (note, if you installed Perian at this point and now have decided not to use it, you must navigate to the /Library/QuickTime and remove the Perian for Mac. component file, otherwise replacement codecs will be screwed up)

Here are other Third-Party Codecs for Quicktime Player .

Note: 1.The latest version 1.2.3 of Perian doesn't work on Mac OS 10.7 (Lion). 2. The QuickTime component only enables you to play these videos via QuickTime on your Mac or PC, and if you want to play common formats like AVI, WMV, MKV, FLV on iPad, iPod, iPhone or use in iMovie etc, you'll need use Video Converter for Mac to convert the videos.

• Download Intel version

 

 

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