Dubbed the “Swiss-army knife for QuickTime,” open source QuickTime component Perian is finally closing down shop. The team of the six-year-old project announced the news today on their website and said the project will retire 90 days after Perian’s final release. The team also said the final release is coming soon and “may or may not work” in the upcoming Mountain Lion, and it will feature a ton of fixes. Luckily, it does not look like Perian’s technology will be hung out to dry, because the Perian team plans to put the source code on Google Code or Github when the time comes. This will allow developers to modify code and add new features for users to enjoy in an open source format.
Perian has been the go-to tool for those looking to add a slew of regular and not-so regular file and video types to QuickTime’s compatibility list, such as WMA, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.263, H.264, and more. Windows Media Video was pretty much the only popular video format that did not make the supported list.
Is anyone really bummed out?
