SweetMacTips

SweetAppSunday - VLC & Perian

It’s been awhile since I’ve given you some sweet free apps to go grab. So, I’ll give you two this week. However, there’s a theme: media playback.

Have you ever downloaded something that QuickTime just couldn’t play? Wish it could? Or maybe you just wanted to use something other than QuickTime?

Heads up.

VLC (aka VideoLan Client) is the swiss army knife of playing video formats. It’s totally free (and open source) and has been around for a decade now. Tried and true, this. I’ve never had a video format thrown at it that it can’t handle. Also, if you need to transcode videos, this is a great solution too (though it’s a bit complicated and you need a good understanding of streams and containers).

Perian is similar to VLC in that it’s a swiss army knife for playing videos, however it’s not actually an application. It’s a set of plugins that gives QuickTime the ability to play the majority of formats that QuickTime doesn’t handle. I think it’s a nice compromise because you can keep the same app but just give it more function. I also like the way QuickTime works from a UI perspective so it’s nice to be able to keep that. Also, because iTunes utilizes QuickTime for playback, it should let you play a bunch of stuff in iTunes that you couldn’t before. (Though, that doesn’t mean that your iOS device is going to be able to.)

They’re both free so have at it!