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Perian

Plugin for Apple QuickTime, 2006-2011

Wikipedia contributorsAdapted for Fathomly · View authors
1 min read
Source updated August 27, 2026
Image credit is listed at the end of this article.

Perian was an open-source QuickTime component that enabled Apple Inc.’s QuickTime to play several popular video formats not supported natively by QuickTime on macOS. It was a joint development of several earlier open source components based on the multiplatform FFmpeg project's libavcodec and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska.

Before it was discontinued, it was featured as the "Download of the Day" on Lifehacker, as well as on several popular blogs including Ars Technica and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

01Project shutdown

On 15 May 2012, the Perian project managers announced on their website that they were shutting down support for the project. In the announcement, they recommended that users look to other products, such as Niceplayer, VLC or MPlayer OS X. They indicated that Perian's source code would be posted online for any developer who wanted to continue with the project. One continuation based on the source code is actively maintained but does not support QuickTime for OS X Mavericks or later.

02Supported formats

Perian lent support for many combinations of video, audio, text, and container formats to QuickTime, including the following:

AV codec support for the following:

Subtitle support for the following:

Container format support for the following:

Watch videos about PerianExplainers and documentaries on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Perian”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

Images, from Wikimedia Commons:

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