The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components for your Mac

Perian for Mac

Perian for Mac

  -  3.4 MB  -  Freeware
  • Latest Version

    Perian 1.2.3 LATEST

  • Review by

    Sophia Jones

  • Operating System

    Mac OS X

  • User Rating

    Click to vote
  • Author / Product

    The Perian Team / External Link

  • Filename

    Perian_1.2.3.dmg

  • MD5 Checksum

    3bbbc44252cb91a55b95e2becad19f3f

If you ever wanted to greatly improve usability of your QuickTime Player, then Perian for Mac is perfect solution for you! With its powerful open source support, the tool brings with itself QuickTime plugins for native support of many modern video formats, audio formats and even enables subtitle support.

⚠️ Note: This product is not developed anymore and might not function properly.

By installing Perian on your macOS, you will not be forced to learn how to control new video player application, which is incredibly important especially to novice computer users who want to experience larger specter of home entertainment which can be watched both on your home monitor, laptop and large HDTV in your living room.

Because Perian is a plugin for your Quick Time player, it does not have its own multimedia playback interface. However, you can access its configuration screen that will control how all these additional videos and audio formats can be controlled. This includes very little tweaks, mostly focused on how audio codecs will be decoded on your Mac (which format, how to play Soft Sounds), enable or disable external subtitles, easy way check for updates (which can be even automatic) and uninstall the app with a single click of a mouse button.

With all major multimedia formats added to your QuickTime Player (such as AVI, MKV, H.264, MPEG4, WMA, DTS, True Audio, AAC, AC3 and VBR MP4), your video and audio experience on Mac will never be the same! Active development on Perian for Mac has stopped, but this app still manages to attract an incredibly large audience that is taking advantage from its excellent multimedia features.
  • 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 1.2.3 Screenshots

    The images below have been resized. Click on them to view the screenshots in full size.

    Perian 1.2.3 Screenshot 1
  • Perian 1.2.3 Screenshot 2

What's new in this version:

- Fixes several problems reported with 1.2.2.
- Some Fraps videos only displayed black. [r1424] (#566)
- Workaround checks for Front Row stopped being effective. [r1426] (#564)
- Fixed compatibility with web video playback. [r1427, r1429, r1450] (#572)
- Worked around System Preferences crashing during an update on 10.6. [r1449] (#591)
- This change will take effect after this update.
- Further fixes to Matroska import. [r1432, r1441, r1447] (#338, #492, #594, #601)