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Perian is shutting down

perian.org

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Re: Perian is shutting down

#31

Post by acangiano »

SeoxyS wrote: post #27
peter_l_downs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the other four things?

Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox. Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.

I prefer Alfred over Quicksilver, and Window Magnet instead of Divvy. Just in case someone is interested in alternatives.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#32

Post by fusiongyro »

SeoxyS wrote: post #27
peter_l_downs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the other four things?

Adium. Quicksilver. Homebrew. Dropbox. Also: Chrome, Xcode, Skitch, Divvy and the basic CLI tools.

It's funny. I used to use Psi, but then I switched to iChat. I used to use Quicksilver, then I switched to Launchbar, and now I just use Spotlight. I have Homebrew, because MacPorts can't install 3.2 of GNU Smalltalk and for no other reason. I haven't installed Dropbox ever, or Skitch (never heard of it, will check it out) or Divvy (I think I downloaded a demo of it once, thought it would be cool, and never went back to buy it).

I don't know what my problem is, but I guess my need for new features keeps diminishing. Maybe in forty years I'll finally be able to use Plan 9.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#33

Post by Schlaefer »

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…

Performance and the youtube issues aside: afaik Perian is the only easy option to add WebM support to Safari.

Are there any alternatives?

Re: Perian is shutting down

#34

Post by Schlaefer »

thristian wrote: post #29
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) th…

A symptom of this issue is that you have to wait before you can start playing the movie. So if you wanted to play a 1 GB mkv the player had to read the whole 1 GB from disc once, which took a fair amount of time back in the days.

Afaik playback performance is not affected by this. Poor playback performance is mainly related to the lack of hardware acceleration (and codec optimizations) people take for granted since h.264 matured on OS X.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#35

Post by Stokestack »

sa1f wrote: post #24
johnpowell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First thing I install is Little Snitch.

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

Except, from what I can tell, there's no way to have it alert you when applications try to call out. So you have to know in advance which applications you want to block, and specify them manually.

Also, if the app you want to block calls out during installation, it's too late.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#36

Post by Stokestack »

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?

Let's hope so.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#37

Post by Stokestack »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #5

I used this at one point, but long ago switched to MPlayerOSX, finding it a much more straightforward interface for playing random format movies than QT, with noticeably better performance. VLC is also... an option.

MPlayer lacks a playlist though, which is annoying.

VLC's recent UI changes have been a step backward (specifically making it impossible to see the playlist and the video at the same time), but at least you can queue things up to play.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#38

Post by sirn »

Stokestack wrote: post #37
WiseWeasel wrote: post #5

I used this at one point, but long ago switched to MPlayerOSX, finding it a much more straightforward interface for playing random format movies than QT, with noticeably better performance. VLC is also... an option.

MPlayer lacks a playlist though, which is annoying. VLC's recent UI changes have been a step backward (specifically making it impossible to see the playlist and the video at the same time), but at least you can queue things up to play.

MPlayer OSX Extended[1] is your friend. It has playlist, it has nice interface and you could swap out MPlayer player binary with a newer one (e.g. mplayer2-git[2] or build your own via Homebrew[3]). I like MPlayer OSX Extended far more than MPlayerX or any other alternatives, shame that it didn't get the attention it deserves.

[1]: http://www.mplayerosx.ch/

[2]: http://code.google.com/p/mplayerosx-builds/downloads/list

[3]: https://github.com/pigoz/mplayerosx-builds/

Re: Perian is shutting down

#39

Post by victorlamhk »

It's really sad. I installed it because Quicktime and iPhoto can't play any video taken from my Canon digital camera. Perian provided system-wide Quicktime support for many video format and this is what VLC or MPlayer cannot compare.....
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