One of the first things many people do after a fresh install of OS X Lion is to install VLC player because it plays almost every video format under the sun. As helpful as it is, VLC player is not easy on the eyes plus not everyone likes it. A better option is to install Perian, the swiss army for QuickTime. Perian is like those codec packages you find for Windows that enable native playback of all popular video formats in the default video player as well as in other places such as Quick Look. Also, did we mention it’s free?
In case you’re wondering, Perian has support for the following video, audio, and subtitle formats:
- File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
- Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
- Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
- AVI support for AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, VBR MP3 and more
- Subtitle support for SSA/ASS, SRT, SAMI
Perian provides native playback support to any app that supports QuickTime. Plus, you don’t have to worry about any illegality of playback components as well since Perian doesn’t use any as has been the case with some codec packages for Windows.
If you think that’s not enough, Perian has support for auto-updates so you will never be stuck with out of date components.
