Filed under: Multimedia, Software, Freeware
Perian 1.1.3 now available, provides lots of fixes
On Monday, Perian 1.1.3 was released. Perian is a Preference Pane that provides QuickTime with a ton of extra codec support, including: AVI, DivX, and FLV. Version 1.1.3 updates the following aspects of Perian: - Enabled Indeo 2/3 decodecs
- Added external idx/sub (VobSub) support
- Added support for H.264 and H.263 in FLV containers
- Apple's decoder now handles Baseline/Main Profile H.264
- Fix inconsistent importing for multi-channel audio
- Reduced memory usage for packed streams
- Added sanity checks on all preferences
- Enabled hack to show subtitles in Front Row
- Fixed negative values in SSA \frz tag
- Fixed VSFilter bug-compatibility for \an
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
tide said 4:12PM on 12-16-2008
Please stop with the internal links within the article body. This is what tags are for, TUAW.
/me slaps TUAW with a duck
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David said 4:22PM on 12-16-2008
Tide is correct: we readers DETEST (hate!) that nonsense.
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PSN: HinchyFC said 4:31PM on 12-16-2008
I don't.
VanillaSpice said 10:56PM on 12-16-2008
Welcome to the World Wide Web, David and tide.
Here on the WWW, we hyperlink various words and images as a means of navigating within and between documents and objects. You will find that adjusting to reading text with links is not difficult and indeed is frequently accomplished within seconds by even the youngest person.
Benefits of hyperlinking are many; two of the more common benefits are a) allowing readers to find definitions of unknown words or acronyms, and b) linking to sites relevant to, or having more information on, the important subjects of an article, so that readers can quickly (by clicking) visit those sites, rather than having to perform a search to find them.
No drawbacks, plenty of benefits. Linking is nothing to disparage. If you want unanchored text you are on the wrong protocol.
Daniel Anderson Jr. said 4:34PM on 12-16-2008
I don't mind the links in these articles, I use them often. But I hate them in articles when used for vocabulary help, wiki or pop-up ads.
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Jake said 4:50PM on 12-16-2008
Agreed. Those internal links are fucking terrible. PLEASE stop using them where you should be using external links. Use tags if you want to reference yourselves.
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Blaze said 4:52PM on 12-16-2008
"Enabled hack to show subtitles in Front Row"
Finally!
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Hobbes said 4:53PM on 12-16-2008
I'm with Tide and David, I expect the links to take me to the subject's web site, not to another TUAW article. It used to drive me crazy and then you guys stopped. I hope you're not going back to doing this in all articles.
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Buran said 5:02PM on 12-16-2008
How about Indeo 5? Nothing uses 2/3 anymore.
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OwlBoy said 5:02PM on 12-16-2008
All the self refrenceing links on the AOL blogs are friggen annoying. It is like whack a mole trying to find the one that leads to what you are talking about.
Please use tags like a normal person.
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Benjamin said 6:23PM on 12-16-2008
A decodec?
Wouldn’t that just be a decoder?
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rdas7 said 6:42PM on 12-16-2008
This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department.
rdas7 said 6:41PM on 12-16-2008
wtf is up with clicking on Perian and being taken back to TUAW? Are you guys retarded?
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nikster said 7:26PM on 12-16-2008
[The link issues seem resolved?]
I just have to say it: Perian is genius. QuickTime is basically useless without it, this is what QuickTime should have been. It plays everything. It updates without requiring a restart. Simple.
Which begs the question: Why didn't Apple include all those (free) codecs in QuickTime to begin with?
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ViRGE said 8:08PM on 12-16-2008
Because they're *not* free. All of this stuff has to be licensed, and much of it is very hard to do so with - Adobe is in no rush to let other products play FLV material, for example. However no one seems interested in going after the FFmpeg project or the products based on it, so long as they are not being commercially distributed.
nikster said 8:18PM on 12-16-2008
@ViRGE: Perian is free and open source. Hence, the codecs it provides are also free and open source.
Just check perian.org - you can download the source and start developing!
Graham Booker said 11:15PM on 12-16-2008
There are several definitions of "free." The libraries used (ffmpeg, etc) do not allow arbitrary distribution, but are restricted under a license (LGPL in how we build it). You may notice there are other "free" tools that are not included in MacOS X, such as wget (IIRC, Apple got in trouble for distributing it in 10.0).
David Hildreth said 8:20PM on 12-16-2008
"codec support, including: AVI, DivX, and FLV"
AVI and FLV are not codecs, they are containers.
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JC said 3:19AM on 12-17-2008
"Apple's decoder now handles Baseline/Main Profile H.264"
Glad to see they finally came to their senses. I just wonder why it is only limited to the Baseline/Main profiles and not everything H.264. I had to uninstall Perian after it killed the framerates on all my HD H.264 files. It had to do with their decoder not supporting multiple CPUs.
Now with the new hardware supporting GPU acceleration, it is not even worth installing IMO. Anything regular QuickTime can't handle, VLC certainly should. Plus all the other hassles it can bring, I pass...
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Graham Booker said 8:37AM on 12-17-2008
Have you ever tried High profile in Apple's codec? It's pathetically slow (1-4 fps), where as Perian can do the full 24 on the same file. This is of course, assuming Apple's codec doesn't crash, of which I have H.264 streams that crash Apple's code. Apple's codec is only marginally faster on certain baseline/main profile streams, which interestingly enough, is the subset of the streams Apple uses for their own content. In addition, Perian never overrode the hardware decoding. Get your facts straight.
In addition I have a main profile H.264 file here that Apple's codec uses 120% CPU (dual core), and gives 15fps. Perian uses 50% CPU and gives 30.
Last note: If Apple would correctly document the proper way to do frame-dropping within QuickTime, Perian could out perform Apple's codec across the board (with the exception of hardware decoding). The loss of framerate is solely due to the fact that we cannot get QuickTime to drop the correct frames, and have to guess at the mechanism for doing this.