Perian shuts shop

Mac OS X add-on company, Perian, is shutting down the project after six years of development and will be releasing the code for its video codec tool to the open source community, The Mac Observer reports.

First released in 2006, Perian is a component for Apple's QuickTime software that allows for the playback of many popular video file formats, including DivX, AVI, MKV and VP6, Macworld states.

The component supported almost 20 video codecs, more than half-a-dozen audio formats, subtitles and more.

The project's discontinuation was revealed on the project's homepage, though the developers did not specifically say why they had chosen this moment to retire Perian, other than that “it's time for all of [them] to move on”.

The project's founders say the Perian source code will be posted to Google Code or Github, while the team claims it cannot guarantee the final version will be OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)-compatible, Tuaw says.