Perian

» see perian.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Perian only ever ran on a Mac, and I have never owned one. My version of the same problem ran on Windows: a film arrived as an AVI, the player refused the audio track, and you went hunting for whatever would make it open. On my side the answer was a codec pack, ffdshow or K-Lite, installed with the vague sense that you were putting something load-bearing into your operating system. On the Mac the answer was one small component, and Mac people talked about Perian the way you talk about a utility that removed an entire category of problem.

Perian was free, open source, and first released on 29 September 2006. QuickTime was extensible by design: a component could register new formats with the system, and then every QuickTime-based application understood those formats without being told why. Perian used that hook to teach the Mac what video on the open internet was actually encoded in. It handled the AVI and Matroska containers, the DivX and XviD families, AC3 and DTS audio tracks, and subtitles down to VobSub and SubStation Alpha.

What people remember is how little there was to it. You installed it and QuickTime Player stopped complaining, and so did iTunes and Front Row and anything else built on the same foundation. The preference pane was close to empty. The team kept it that way on purpose, and the farewell letter they eventually wrote is a little proud about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what they put on the front page ~

On 14 May 2012 the product page became a notice. The Internet Archive holds perian.org as the ordinary download page at 19:49 UTC on 13 May and as the letter by the 18th, and the Mac press wrote it up on the 14th, which brackets the change to a single day. "We began the Perian project over 6 years ago," it opened. "We wanted to simplify viewing your content. Our team has attained that goal and with that in mind, Perian will be retired soon."

It was signed by Chris Forsythe, Graham Booker, Alexander Strange and Augie Fackler, with a postscript thanking Erica Sadun for helping them write it. They pointed users at NicePlayer, told developers to pick the source up where they had left it, and declined further donations on the grounds that the money would do more good at Child's Play or the EFF. The last piece of advice was that if and when Perian stopped working, there was always VLC.

~ ninety days from a release that never came ~

The letter set a deadline more interesting than it looks. "Starting 90 days after the final Perian release, we will no longer provide support," it said, and in the same breath promised that the final release was still to come: one more version carrying all the accumulated fixes, which might or might not work on the forthcoming OS X 10.8.

That version never shipped. Fourteen years later perian.org still offers Perian_1.2.3.dmg, built on 23 July 2011, and the CacheFly link behind it still serves all 3.5 megabytes. Measured against the last version that actually exists, the ninety days had expired in October 2011, seven months before the team said goodbye.

~ why a component stopped mattering ~

Perian depended on an architecture Apple was walking away from. QuickTime X arrived with Snow Leopard in 2009 and did not load the old QuickTime 7 components, so Perian's reach was already narrowing to applications built on the previous generation, and the team's open uncertainty about Mountain Lion was the honest position of people who could see the floor being taken up. The problem was also solving itself from another direction, because VLC played everything without touching the system at all. Perian's own letter said so. The source went to GitHub, where Graham Booker's copy is still the one people fork for old versions of macOS.

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