Perian 0.5

Freeware QuickTime component with support for a bunch of additional video formats, like AVI, DivX, and FLV. Install this and you can play these formats using your favorite QuickTime player app instead of VLC. Works great in my quick testing (but I still needed this additional sound component to get audio to work with an AVI video downloaded via BitTorrent). Seems like it supports most of the formats supported by VLC. (Via David Young.)

Update: If you wind up with a 948 KB download named “Perian_0.5.dmg.bz2”, don’t expand it like a regular bzip2 archive. Instead, rename it by removing the “.bz2” extension, and just open the .dmg file like a regular disk image.

★ Sunday, 1 October 2006