Perian

Perian was an open source QuickTime component that enabled Apple Inc.’s QuickTime to play several popular video formats not supported natively by QuickTime on Mac OS X. It was a joint development of several earlier open source components based on the multiplatform FFmpeg project's libavcodec and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska.

It has been featured as the "Download of the Day" on Lifehacker, as well as on several popular blogs including Ars Technica and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Project shutdown

On 15 May 2012, the Perian project managers announced on their website that they are shutting down support for the project. In the announcement, they recommended that users look to other products, such as Niceplayer, VLC or MPlayer OS X. They indicated that Perian's source code would be posted online for any developer who wanted to continue with the project. One continuation based on the source code is actively maintained but does not support QuickTime in OS X Mavericks or later.