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15 May 2012, 16:45

Perian QuickTime component to perish

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In a post on the project's homepage, the Perian development team has announced that its open source QuickTime component will soon be retired as development on the software comes to an end. Often referred to as "The Swiss army knife for QuickTime" by its developers, Perian is a preference pane – sometimes abbreviated as prefpane due to the file extension (.prefpane) – for Mac OS X that adds support for several video formats which are not natively supported by QuickTime; this allows the QuickTime video player and the operating system's QuickLook feature to play back files which would normally not be playable.

The team say that they are currently working to "wrap up our loose ends, pack up our bags, and move on to new and exciting projects". The developers note that they will soon release one last version of Perian that includes all of the fixes they've been working on since the previous update; however, this version may or may not work with Apple's upcoming Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion operating system. 90 days after release, the developers will no longer be providing support.

The Perian project was started just over six years ago with its first release published in September 2006. Members of the core Perian Project Team include Chris Forsythe, best known for his work on the Growl notification system, Adium and Fire developer Graham Booker, FFmpeg developer Alexander Strange and Google Software Engineer Augie Fackler. "Our stewardship has been a blast but it's time for all of us to move on", said the developers in the announcement.

The team advise users to try alternative open source media players for Mac such as MPlayer OS X or the VLC Media Player. The current release of Perian is version 1.2.3 from July 2011; source code for Perian is licensed under the LGPLv2.1.

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