10.9 Mavericks quick look support (codecs like perian)

I haven't tried Quicktime player 7 on Mavericks. Does it work? If it does, it means Quicktime proper is still supported and that perian may continue to work. Now it depends on Quicktime Support by Quick Look in 10.9. If Quick Look now only uses AVFoundation, then an AVFoundation "perian" plugin would be required. However, there's no public API to build AVFoundation plugins, so...

jeanlain said:

I haven't tried Quicktime player 7 on Mavericks. Does it work?

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Quicktime Player 7 still works in Mavericks... but unfortunately the Perian Quicktime plugin doesn't work anymore, giving preview icons to all video files in the Finder, and letting you play those video files in the Finder using QuickLook.

We really need a replacement for Perian.

ViewRoyal said:

Quicktime Player 7 still works in Mavericks... but unfortunately the Perian Quicktime plugin doesn't work anymore, giving preview icons to all video files in the Finder, and letting you play those video files in the Finder using QuickLook.

We really need a replacement for Perian.

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Strange. I have no issues with the perian quicktime plugin on 10.9 GM, still seems to be working ok for me. the perian pref pane is also fully functional.

The pref pane works for me too but quick look doesn't. Something I'm doing wrong here, perhaps?

leinadhok said:

The pref pane works for me too but quick look doesn't. Something I'm doing wrong here, perhaps?

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Quick Look hasn't worked with Perian for me since Snow Leopard.

It used to work here, but since Quick Look in Maverick no longer uses QuickTime, you can say goodbye to video previews in the finder, except for mpeg-4 variants.

nicroma said:

Quick Look hasn't worked with Perian for me since Snow Leopard.

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This. I haven't been able to use Perian+Quick Look for a while now. It's not something that was removed from Mavericks as far as I know.

Yep, Perian appears to be broken in Mavericks.

Quicklook will still work on .mov, .mpg, and .mp4 files since that is in a format native to QuickTime.

RabidMacFan said:

Yep, Perian appears to be broken in Mavericks.

Quicklook will still work on .mov, .mpg, and .mp4 files since that is in a format native to QuickTime.

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Did you report this to the Perian Developers?

It's still under development on GitHub: https://github.com/MaddTheSane/perian

You might try opening an issue report, but I don't know if the developer is planning to target 10.9. The latest GitHub release (1.3.1) does not work for me on 10.9 Mavericks GM — it crashes Quicktime 7.

Wow! There's hope!

pastrychef said:

Wow! There's hope!

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Hardly. QuickTime isn't going anywhere and in fact it is deprecated in Mavericks. The name QuickTime Player (version X) is highly confusing since the player doesn't use the QuickTime technology at all.
So there's no hope for QuickTime plugins in the future. And since the new frameworks replacing QuickTime don't support plugin codecs, no equivalent of Perian can be developed.

jeanlain said:

Hardly. QuickTime isn't going anywhere and in fact it is deprecated in Mavericks. The name QuickTime Player (version X) is highly confusing since the player doesn't use the QuickTime technology at all.
So there's no hope for QuickTime plugins in the future. And since the new frameworks replacing QuickTime don't support plugin codecs, no equivalent of Perian can be developed.

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Actually the new framework supports plugins, but the api to write them are not public yet.
You can find for example a lot of plugins inside Final Cut X, and if you copy them to /Library/Video/Plug-Ins they work in QuickTIme Player X too.

I have noticed that as well, and I've been wondering whether copying the FCPX plugins to that folder would work.

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musio said:

VLC is great for playing anything you throw at it which covers that. It's just a same there is no quick view and you have to open a file to see what it is every time.

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There's not much videolan can do about it since QuickLook requires that you present your media file in a QuickTime-friendly format. So for incompatible videos (like mkv), that would require transcoding/converting on the fly, which will be much too long and power hungry.

jesstech said:

It's still under development on GitHub: https://github.com/MaddTheSane/perian

You might try opening an issue report, but I don't know if the developer is planning to target 10.9. The latest GitHub release (1.3.1) does not work for me on 10.9 Mavericks GM — it crashes Quicktime 7.

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I really really hope he is aiming for 10.9 support as broken Perian is frankly a PIA. Why oh why can't they offer native support for mkv with nearly always a h264 video in the container is beyond me though they do have an excuse with all the various AVI formats.

Gav Mack said:

I really really hope he is aiming for 10.9 support as broken Perian is frankly a PIA. Why oh why can't they offer native support for mkv with nearly always a h264 video in the container is beyond me though they do have an excuse with all the various AVI formats.

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Agreed, its absurd how many operating systems/devices only support h.264 in the .mp4 container. it would be pretty trivial to add mkv support, and as you said 99% of the time .mkv files are using h.264.

Perian works in Maverick for me. Just watching an mkv in Quicktime Player 7...

Gav Mack said:

I really really hope he is aiming for 10.9 support as broken Perian is frankly a PIA. Why oh why can't they offer native support for mkv with nearly always a h264 video in the container is beyond me though they do have an excuse with all the various AVI formats.

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I think it's because QuickTime requires that the track content is indexed. I suppose the QuickTime format (and the related mp4) format, as well as avi have an index. For mkv, m2v, wmv, there is no index, so the player does the indexing during import. That takes time. Indexing is not required for playback, but since QuickTime also does some editing, it needs to do it.

Just want to chime in on this. I've noticed this as well. I feel this is a pretty big under sight on apple's part. I suppose it's important to point out windows doesn't work with a lot of this stuff without divx or other codecs installed. Just wish there was an alternative to Perian

In my instance I have the pref pane. I've tried uninstalling it and reinstalling. Doesn't seem to make a diff the files just show up as quicktime icons.

Bummer.

I too miss being able to play .avi files in quick look. Would Flip4Mac work?
I have had a bad experience with the software in the past and would want to avoid trying it if at all possible.