Upgrading any computer whether it be a Macintosh or a Wintel PC has always been somewhat problematic and at times frustrating. The previous fact made a re-emergence in my life recently when I finally decided to upgrade from my trusty old PowerPC driven Macintosh to a shiny new Intel based iMac, only this particular change included additional frustrations beyond just the need to upgrade a large amount of my applications.
Usual upgrade frustrations aside this particular computer upgrade required a series of updates that I have never had to perform before namely my QuickTime components were not universal, subsequently tarnishing my dream of higher speed video encodes and decodes. At first I couldn’t find any definite solutions due in large part to the fact that searching for QuickTime components brings up all sorts of not clearly labeled, universal or not, components. I searched for quite a long time for replacements for the components I already had only to find that there were no upgrades for them. Finally I realized I was asking the great Goggle the wrong questions, namely I needed to ask for what I wanted not for upgrades to that which I already had. This new line of questioning finally revealed Perian.
What is Perian you ask? Perian according to perian.org is, “The swiss-army knife for QuickTime” and this certainly is the case. Further, Perian is a universal QuickTime component that supports the playback of AVI, FLV, 3ivX, DivX, Flash Screen Video, MS-MPEG4, Sorenson H.263, Truemotion VP6, Xvid and AVI support f or: AAC, AC3 Audio using A52Codec, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3.
To install Perian first you must download it from http://perian.org/ . Once downloaded all you have to do is mount the .dmg and drag the "Perian.component" to the conveniently provided QuickTime alias located on the Perian .dmg. After you have installed Perian you should be good to go but if you upgraded from your old Power PC based computer like I did, using the migration tool and a firewire cable, you may also want to remove all non universal Quicktime components. To do this all you have to do is double click the QuickTime folder located on the Perian .dmg and right click "Get Info", or alternatively you can select the offending component and press ⌘ i to do the same thing, which will bring up info regarding the component including whether the component is universal or PowerPC based.
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