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October 04, 2006
Perian
Around a month or two ago Augie and Graham told me about this project they were working on. Basically the gist of it was to allow multiple formats to be played in QuickTime (the API, not QuickTime Player). It intrigued me so I started helping out where needed.
Fast forward to last week and Perian .5 got released. It's basically ffmpeg right now, but the end goal is to make it so that any format can be played in QuickTime.
Combine Perian with NicePlayer and you can basically ditch VLC/MplayerOSX/others for most formats. We're working on adding in Matroska for the 1.0 release, and then moving on from there.
Overall it's pretty nice stuff, and I'm happy to be involved. So I thought I'd mention it here.
Now, for the curious, Perian is a component for QuickTime. Basically, think of it as a plugin. And since QuickTime is the api that 9/10 of apps on OS X use to play media, so long as they can open the file it'll be read.
Before Perian, I had 66 components installed. Now with Perian I have 29. Augie only has 3. So ya, it ends up making life a little easier.
A "meme" going around is that this is "Grandma's component". Basically instead of telling Grandma to go download 20 different components or VLC, she can download just this one. We've tried to make the install as simple as possible for this reason, so I think this is a good thing.