There's a mantra here at the Ars Orbiting HQ when staffers and freelancers invariably switch from whatever to the Mac, and then find themselves stuck when it comes to watching their porn video collections. "PERIAN," everyone chants. "Duh, Perian. Maybe VLC but... Perian."

Perian, known as the "Swiss-army knife of QuickTime components," is an extremely popular QuickTime plugin that allows you to watch a huge variety of video codecs from within Apple's native video player. (Read an interview we did in 2006 with Perian lead developer Augie Fackler.) The software went 1.0 in the summer of 2007, so why are we talking about it now? Well yesterday, the Perian team released version 1.1.1.

A x.x.1 release may not normally be something we write about, but the list of changes is pretty extensive for a mere x.x.1 release. Taken straight from the support page, the changes include:

H.264 in AVI fixed

Some anamorphic AVI files are now supported

Performance problems due to PIC fixed with Xcode 3.1

Incorrect frame skipping on H.264 intra frames fixed

Better character set detection

The update checker is now much more polite

Several parsing and rendering bugs with subtitles fixed

Player freezing while loading subtitles with embedded fonts fixed

Audio fixed for some older MKV files with AAC/FLAC

Strange values in MKV chapters or video sizes are handled better

Initial support for SAMI subtitles added

Worked around a QuickTime bug (#5770288) causing frames to be lost during export

New codecs: DosBox ZMBV, VP6+Alpha, Nellymoser ASAO

FFmpeg: Crashing on PPC G3 fixed

Fraps decoding artifacts fixed

Whew, I'm so glad someone addressed the rudeness in the update checker; I was beginning to get seriously offended.

Considering that it has been just over half a year since the 1.1 release (and nothing in between then and 1.0), perhaps this update deserves a little more credit. Regardless, if you're a Perian fan like we are, then it's in your best interest to update and make sure you can keep up-to-date on all of the latest codecs that the, ahem, video world is using. As usual, Perian is entirely free, so get to downloading already!