Perian to Cease Development
The developers of Perian, the free and extremely popular video format extender for QuickTime, have announced that they are ceasing work on the project. In a statement on the project’s Web site, the developers have said that it’s time to move on, their goal of making video content playback easier on the Mac having been met.
There are plenty of standalone Mac video players. Perian is interesting because it enables any application that supports QuickTime or Quick Look to play additional formats. QuickTime once had built-in support for playing Flash videos. These days, Apple would rather promote its preferred video formats than ensure that applications on its platform can play files that users encounter in the wild. (Imagine if there were popular image formats that Safari and Preview couldn’t display.) I haven’t been following the QuickTime API very closely, but my impression is that ever since QuickTime X in Snow Leopard, the entire plug-in system has been deprecated, with no replacement.
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The Perian folks were heroic. A sad day.
"These days, Apple would rather promote its preferred video formats than ensure that applications on its platform can play files that users encounter in the wild."
Shouldn't there be a market for folks who want tractors other than Microsoft brand? Are barriers to entry really so high? There is money in niches. Folks will always need tractors.
"I haven’t been following the QuickTime API very closely, but my impression is that ever since QuickTime X in Snow Leopard, the entire plug-in system has been deprecated, with no replacement."
God, I hate being on an EOL'd platform. It's just nothing but sad and a big bag of hurt.
Where's BeOS when you need it?