How to Use Perian for Quicktime to Play MKV, AVI, FLV etc. on Mac

If you are using a Mac, you may be frustrated when come across many kinds of semi-compatible video formats like FLV, MKV and AVI that makes enjoying movies a daily challenge.

QuickTime, for example, only supports limited video formats like MPEG-4 and H.264. The problem is that there are still many video files which are encoded in XviD and DivX. Maybe you also have some old WMV-encoded files you'd like to playback.

So, you may have some videos need to  play in QuickTime, such as AVI format, while others require FLV Player or mPlayer or VideoLan Client. You can adopt a way to re-encode all your video files to H.264 to play them in QuickTime by adopting this Video Converter for Mac (Mac OS X Mountain Lion included).

What's Perian?

Perian can be recognized as the Swiss-army knife of QuickTime, or saying as add-in of QuickTime. It enables QuickTime to play many popular video formats that not supported by QuickTime natively, like WebM/VP8, MKV. Perian codec is open-source and you can download Perain here.

Note: 1.The latest version 1.2.3 of Perian for QuickTime doesn't work on Mac OS 10.7 (Lion). 2. The QuickTime components only enable you to play these videos via QuickTime on your Mac or PC, and if you would like to play common formats like AVI, WMV, FLV on iPod, iPad, iPhone or edit them with iMovie etc, you'll have to adopt  Video Converter for Mac to convert the videos.

After downloading the Package of Perian for QuickTime, open the disk image, double click Perian.prefPane icon. It will automatically install and update all its components. Drag and drop the QuickTime components to the Library -> QuickTime folder you selected: your user's Library (which is only for you) or the top-level Library (which is for everyone on Mac).

After done, restart all programs that run QuickTime(iTunes, QuickTime Player, your browser, etc.), then you are done.

You'll find that QuickTime now can magically support more diverse video formats:  AVI, DivX, DivX 3.11 alpha, XviD,  MS-MPEG4 v3, 3ivX, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v1, Truemotion VP6, Sorenson H.263, FLV and formats that an AVI file contains--AC3, AAC Audio, VBR MP3, mpeg4, and h.264.

Perian for QuickTime is a good add-in for QuickTime. But it is not the perfect one for good quality, since it provides somewhat sub-par quality when compared with the method of directly getting the codes from the source. Thus, Perian for QuickTime can be nice and convenient but not suitable for quality lover.(Please note that if you have got Perian installed on your Mac and now want to quit it, you have to delete the Perian. 

component file by navigating to the /Library/QuickTime. Otherwise, it will screw up the replacement codecs.)

Article Credit: www.iskysoft.com

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