Perian is shutting down • Hacker News Board

Re: Perian is shutting down

#21

Post by hackermom » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:10 AM UTC

breidh wrote: post #13

kylebrown wrote: post #8

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

There's MPlayer... http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/

Re: Perian is shutting down

#22

Post by ye-olde-taper » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:12 AM UTC

filmgirlcw wrote: post #3

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.

The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?

Re: Perian is shutting down

#23

Post by BenSS » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:22 AM UTC

zbowling wrote: post #11

filmgirlcw wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#24

Post by sa1f » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:23 AM UTC

johnpowell wrote: post #19

pudquick wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, two of them are probably VLC and The Unarchiver.

First thing I install is Little Snitch.

I find Radio Silence to be cleaner. http://radiosilenceapp.com/ Only 9 bucks.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#25

Post by Groxx » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

hackermom wrote: post #21

breidh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's MPlayer... http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

And in the OS X context the better form of it, MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/

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.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#26

Post by zbowling » Tue, May 15, 2012, 1:30 AM UTC

Zev wrote: post #16

zbowling wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what? no... Accelerate.framework is available to everyone.

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.

It does. Specifically the vImage part.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#27

Post by SeoxyS » Tue, May 15, 2012, 2:07 AM UTC

peter_l_downs wrote: post #10

SeoxyS wrote: post #2

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).

What are the other four things?

Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox.

Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#28

Post by filmgirlcw » Tue, May 15, 2012, 2:25 AM UTC

ye-olde-taper wrote: post #22

filmgirlcw wrote: post #3

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.

The announcement mentions that the iPhone does not support QuickTime. Is this a sign that QuickTime is on its way out?

Eventually. There is too much legacy code that runs on QT for it to deprecate now, but QT 7 was really the last full version. QT X has drastically reduced dev access to tools and as more media handling becomes browser centric and H.264 based, it isn't likely to go much further.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#29

Post by thristian » Tue, May 15, 2012, 2:33 AM UTC

X-Istence wrote: post #7

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…

Under the heading "Frequently Asked Questions" on the linked page, it says:

Why does it take so long for MKV to load?

QuickTime expects to know the location of every single frame in a movie in order to play it. This is easy with its native format, MOV/MP4, but more difficult for several others, including MKV. Perian has to read in the entire file in order for seeking and playback to work.

That's probably (part of) the reason MKV and WebM are slow for you (since WebM uses the MKV container format).

Re: Perian is shutting down

#30

Post by filmgirlcw » Tue, May 15, 2012, 2:35 AM UTC

zbowling wrote: post #11

filmgirlcw wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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.