TUAW's Daily Mac App: Perian

Yes, Perian is a very helpful utility, but I feel the bigger issue is with Quicktime. Why are we, in 2011, still using other utilities or apps to perform the functions that Quicktime should already be doing? Why was Quicktime X even released? It is riddled with issues. I even have videos that will play fine in Quicktime 7.6.6 (Pro version), but not at all in Quicktime X. - - - Upon further thought, I know why Quicktime X was released. It was to "hype" the Snow Leopard release. Nothing more. It is a pointless, worthless piece of eye candy (appealing yes, but sour to the stomach).

Perian is the bee's knees!

I've used MPlayerX and I've never really been happy with it. There are far fewer options in it than VLC, and it has so many bugs that half the time I think its pre-release software. I prefer VLC, its more mature and powerful. I'll revisit MPlayerX one day in the future once it has stabilized.

VLC never feels like an "upgrade." MplayerX is proving to be fairly nice, finally an up-to-date version of Mplayer for Mac, and has a few cool features (pick up where you left off is nice) but Perian is great.

If you really want the Mac-like "just works" version of playing movies, it's all you need for most everything.

Good to have, except it will not allow mpeg2 playback in Quicktime. Ripping a DVD to mpeg2 format is FAST and allows you to burn backup DVD without re-coding. Apple's mpeg2 component doesn't allow this either.

greet iPad competitors
http://mydailymobile.co.cc/

There are so many cool things you can do with Perian. For example, you can take an MKV and open it up into Quicktime.

...from there, save it as an MOV. Next, rename the extension from MOV to M4V - this will allow you to open the file into Subler and apply tons of meta data (including the HD tag for iTunes so that you can combine SD and HD files into one listing). Oh, you'll need version .10 of Subler for this to work - the latest version will no longer open these files.

Anyway, currently I have 1,165 movies in my collection - and they're ALL accessible from within iTunes thanks to Perian. I've re-encoded nothing, the various codecs are simply placed into a wrapper that iTunes recognizes - Perian does the rest! And thanks to MoboPlayer on my Droid X, I can play pretty much every movie I've got on it (was never able to do that with my ol' iPod Touch).

The More Ya Know™ [cue after school special music]

What about MPlayerX? It's a very strong alternative to VLC and Quicktime. It can play anything VLC can while it looks like Quicktime.

"Resort" to programs like VLC? I think the word you're looking for here is Upgrade.