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Perian is shutting down

perian.org

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Re: Perian is shutting down

#11

Post by zbowling »

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 hardware acceleration, better battery life (with a few tricks), and multicore processing that the old model just doesn't work with.

Right now when you run older codecs, Quicktime X actually runs a little host process in 32bit that actually does the decoding using a fork of the old Quicktime 7 code. Native codecs run in 64bit using multiple cores and hardware acceleration.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#12

Post by zbowling »

notJim wrote: post #9
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…

I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.

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

Re: Perian is shutting down

#14

Post by atlbeer »

kschults wrote: post #4

Best of luck to the whole team there. It's such a great tool, and seamlessly pulled off. I'll be sad to see it go, and I'll be crossing my fingers in the hopes that it will work with future OS releases for a while.

I optd opt of the beta due to this reason and mentally filed it under "WebM performs poorly"

Thank you for appropriately assigning the root cause. I would have never linked the two.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#15

Post by Zev »

notJim wrote: post #9
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…

I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.

Apple has provided the "Video Decode Acceleration Framework" for Mac OS X since 10.6.3: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2267/_in...

Re: Perian is shutting down

#16

Post by Zev »

zbowling wrote: post #12
notJim wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.

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.

Re: Perian is shutting down

#17

Post by xymostech »

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.

This is about how I feel also. I use MPlayer when I need to watch a movie, VLC when I need to play anything weird (like streams or anything).

Re: Perian is shutting down

#18

Post by pudquick »

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?

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

Re: Perian is shutting down

#20

Post by ye-olde-taper »

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.

It might "seem" that way.

But as others have pointed out, there is indeed another major open source media player.

At what point did VLC start using the ffmpeg libraries?

If I'm not mistaken mplayer has used them since its inception.

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