Perian is a great plugin for Apple’s Quicktime player. It’s an open source utility that enables Quicktime to play many popular video formats that it does not support out of the box.
Installing Perian is pretty straightforward. The only requirement mentioned on the project’s website is that you’re using Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher. Download the latest release of the plugin from the project’s website. When the download completes the installer image should mount on its own.
Double click the file Perian.prefPane to complete the installation. The System Preferences window will now pop up asking you whether you want to install Perian for all users or just the user you are logged in as. Choose one of the options.
The installation of Perian is now complete. You can click on the Perian icon in the System Preferences pane if you want to make any changes to the settings or if you want to uninstall Perian. But first, it’s time to test drive the new powers of Quicktime. So find a video or audio file with a format that Quicktime wouldn’t previously open, and now try opening it with Quicktime.
