Perian Killed Off

Perian is reaching the end of its life cycle, and the developers have announced that they’ll no longer support the project, or update it for the upcoming Mountain Lion release. The popular QuickTime plugin that helped bring codec support to OS X when it needed it the most six years ago will stop being supported in 90 days.

From the Perian Blog:

We began the Perian project over 6 years ago. We wanted to simplify viewing your content. Our team has attained that goal and with that in mind, Perian will be retired soon. Our stewardship has been a blast but it’s time for all of us to move on … Starting 90 days after the final Perian release, we will no longer provide support. We’ll wrap up our loose ends, pack up our bags, and move on to new and exciting projects

The project will be placed on Github or Google Code once the Perian team wraps up with it, but that doesn’t exactly ensure that the project will live on and continue to be supported. VisualHub was killed off back in 2009 and the source code was released to the public, but there still hasn’t been a spinoff of the application worth downloading. That said there are a couple of other apps that pretty much handle all the codecs that Perian does at this point. You can hit up VLC and get support for all of your various video codecs. The project should have you almost entirely covered.

I’m pretty bummed, though; Perian has always been one of the first plugins I download whenever a I buy a new Mac. Ah well, best of luck to the Perian team. We can’t wait to see what they do next.

Via: 512px

Joshua is the Content Marketing Manager at BuySellAds. He’s also the founder of Macgasm.net. And since all that doesn’t quite give him enough content to wrangle, he’s also a technology journalist in his spare time, with bylines at PCWorld, Macworld and TechHive.