Perian: Your Video Playback Swiss Army Knife

By default, QuickTime (and other apps like Front Row and iMovie that use its underlying technology) doesn’t support many video formats. In particular, those *cough* legal *cough* videos that you download using BitTorrent are usually encoded in XviD or DivX. Sure, you can use VLC to watch these types of videos, but if you want to view them in Front Row, or import it into iMovie for editing, you need the proper codecs.

Traditionally you had to scour for these codecs all over the Internet; and when worst came to worst, you’d have to resort to manually compiling them from the source code. Thankfully, Perian comes to the rescue by bringing all these codecs in an easy to use installer packaged into a single download.

Once you’ve downloaded Perian, it will install a new icon in your System Preferences. You can choose to either install it for your own user account or for the entire system, so everyone can use it. Under System Preferences, you can adjust the audio output. Perian has the necessary codecs to drive more than stereo speakers, so those with 5.1 or even 7.1 surround sound setups will be able to enjoy great quality audio.

You can also remove Perian via the System Preferences if you wish. For a full list of the codecs Perian supports, visit their website. It’s quite comprehensive, supporting virtually everything except Windows Media. For Windows Media support, you’ll need to download Flip4Mac, as Perian only installs open source codecs.

Get your free copy of Perian today!