Perian is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

 QuickTime component that enables Apple Inc.’s QuickTime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

 to play several popular video formats not supported natively by QuickTime on Mac OS X

Mac OS X

Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...

. It is a joint development of several earlier open source components based on the multiplatform FFmpeg

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

 project's libavcodec

Libavcodec

libavcodec is a free software/open source LGPL-licensed library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data. Same name but incompatible libraries are provided from both FFmpeg project and Libav project....

 and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska.

It has been featured as the "Download of the Day" on Lifehacker

Lifehacker.com

Lifehacker is a weblog about life hacks and software which launched on January 31, 2005. The site is owned by Gawker Media and covers Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux programs as well as time-saving tips and tricks. The staff updates the site about 18 times each weekday, with reduced updates on...

, as well as on several popular blogs including
Ars Technica

Ars Technica

Ars Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...

 and
The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

Supported formats

Perian lends support for many combinations of video, audio, text, and container formats to QuickTime, including the following:

AV codec support for the following:

• MPEG-4 Part 2
  MPEG-4 Part 2
  MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...
  
  
• MS-MPEG4 v1, v2 and v3
• H.263
  H.263
  H.263 is a video compression standard originally designed as a low-bitrate compressed format for videoconferencing. It was developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group in a project ending in 1995/1996 as one member of the H.26x family of video coding standards in the domain of the ITU-T.H.263...
  
  
• H.264
• Flash Screen Video
• Truemotion VP6
  VP6
  On2 TrueMotion VP6 is a proprietary lossy video compression format and video codec. It is an incarnation of the TrueMotion video codec, a series of video codecs developed by On2 Technologies. This codec is commonly used by Adobe Flash, Flash Video, and JavaFX media files.- Overview :The VP6 codec...
  
   & VP3
• HuffYUV
  Huffyuv
  Huffyuv is a lossless video codec created by Ben Rudiak-Gould which is meant to replace uncompressed YCbCr as a video capture format.Despite the "YUV" in the name, it does not compress the YUV color space, but YCbCr...
  
  
• Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska)
• Snow wavelet video
• DOSBox
  DOSBox
  DOSBox is emulator software that emulates an IBM PC compatible computer running MS-DOS. It is intended especially for use with old PC games. DOSBox is free software....
  
   video
• DTS Coherent Acoustics audio
• Nellymoser Asao Codec
  Nellymoser Asao Codec
  Asao is a proprietary single-channel codec and compression format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of audio, developed by Nellymoser Inc....
  
  
• Windows Media Audio (WMA)
  Windows Media Audio
  Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...
  
   v1 & v21
• Dolby Digital
  Dolby Digital
  Dolby Digital is the name for audio compression technologies developed by Dolby Laboratories. It was originally called Dolby Stereo Digital until 1994. Except for Dolby TrueHD, the audio compression is lossy. The first use of Dolby Digital was to provide digital sound in cinemas from 35mm film prints...
  
  
• Fraps
  Fraps
  Fraps is a benchmarking, screen capture, and real-time video capture utility for DirectX and OpenGL applications. It is commonly used to determine a computer's performance with a game, as well as record gaming footage...
  
  
• Indeo 2, 3 and 5
• WebM
  WebM
  WebM is an audio-video format designed to provide a royalty-free, open video compression format for use with HTML5 video. The project's development is sponsored by Google....
  
  /VP8
  VP8
  VP8 is an open video compression format released by Google, originally created by On2 Technologies.After purchasing On2 Technologies in early 2010, Google has provided an irrevocable patent promise for underlying patents for the VP8 format, and released a bitstream format specification under a...
  
  
• FFV1
  FFV1
  FFV1, which stands for "FF video codec 1", is a lossless intra-frame video codec. It can use either variable length coding or arithmetic coding for entropy coding...
  
  
• Theora
  Theora
  Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
  
  

Subtitle support for the following:

• (Advanced) SubStation Alpha
  SubStation Alpha
  SubStation Alpha , abbreviated SSA, is a subtitle file format created by CS Low that allows for more advanced subtitles than the conventional SRT and similar formats. This format can be rendered with VSFilter in conjunction with a DirectShow-aware video player , or MPlayer with the SSA/ASS library...
  
  
• SRT
  SubRip
  SubRip is a software program for Windows which "rips" subtitles and their timings from video. It is free software, released under the GNU GPL...
  
  
• SAMI
  SAMI
  SAMI is a Microsoft accessibility initiative released in 1998. The structured markup language is designed to simplify creating captions for media playback on a PC, i.e. not for broadcast purposes....
  
  
• VobSub

Container format support for the following:

• FLV file format
• NUV
  MythTV
  MythTV is a free and open source home entertainment application with a simplified "10-foot user interface" design for the living-room TV, and turns a computer with the necessary hardware into a network streaming digital video recorder, a digital multimedia home entertainment system, or home theater...
  
   file format
• Matroska
  Matroska
  The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks in one file. It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows...
  
   (MKV)

See also

• Windows Media Components for QuickTime
  Windows Media Components for QuickTime
  Windows Media Components for QuickTime, also known as Flip4Mac WMV Player by Telestream, Inc. is one of the few commercial products that allow playback of Microsoft's proprietary audio and video codecs inside QuickTime for Mac OS X....
  
  
• Xiph QuickTime Components
  Xiph QuickTime Components
  The Xiph QuickTime Components are Xiph.org's implementation of the Ogg container along with the Speex, Theora, FLAC and Vorbis codecs for QuickTime...
  
  
• Combined Community Codec Pack
  Combined Community Codec Pack
  The Combined Community Codec Pack, more commonly referred to as the CCCP, is a collected archive of codecs packed for Microsoft Windows, designed originally for the playback of anime fansubs. The CCCP is developed and maintained by members of various fansubbing groups...
  
  (A similar bundle for Windows)