Best Perian Alternative for macOS Mojave

Ross Johns
2 min readJul 23, 2020

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Mac OS X. At some point Perian was the perfect solution to any codec problems in QuickTime.

Unfortunately Perian isn’t being developed anymore. For those who use QuickTime 10 or newer Perian is no longer useful. If this is the case Perian alternative Mac apps can make a big difference. You should be careful though when looking for Perian alternative since not all of those on the Internet are really helpful.

Elmedia Multiformat Player — Best Perian Alternative Mac

Among the best Perian alternatives for Mac Elmedia Player stands out with its ability to play lots of file types on Mac OS X (Sierra included). Elmedia Player is a worthy replacement for Perian with its support of all sorts of media file types like MKV, AVI, WMV, etc. on OS X 10.7 and later. It is very easy to install and use.

Elmedia

How To Play any video on Mac With Elmedia

1. Download & Install

If you want a quicker way, simply download the player from the site. Wait for your download to finish then run the app.

Elmedia Player

2. Add files

Elmedia offers several ways to add files to it for your convenience:

Drag and drop the files in its open window or on the player’s Dock icon.

When in Finder right-click on the video file you want to watch and then “Open With” option to choose Elmedia Player as the app to open this file.

In the “File” menu of Elmedia Player use “Open…” option.

Elmedia Player

3. Enjoy!

Elmedia Player supports an impressive array of common and uncommon audio & video formats: FLV, AVI, MOV, WMV, MP4, MP3, DAT, FLAC, M4V, MPG, MKV, etc. Elmedia’s features at a glance:

can play FLV, DIVX, DAT, etc;

built-in web browser to browse online videos from the app;

you can create and manage playlists;

adjustable video image;

adjustable playback speed;

high quality playback with 10-band graphic equalizer, video tuner, etc;

hardware acceleration for smooth HD playback;

external audio tracks are supported;

you can make precise screenshots during movie playback (using Control-Command-S shortcut) or convert the whole video into a set of images that can be saved in different formats;

adjustable audio settings;

stream music and videos from Elmedia Player PRO to AirPlay devices and receive AirPlay content with Elmedia Player PRO.

A quick guide to using Perian for QuickTime:

1. Install Perian

Download the plugin, click the disk icon, then double-click Perian.prefPane.

All the components will be installed and updated automatically, you can drag-and-drop them to the Library → QuickTime folder or your private Library, it is accessible only to you, or the top-level Library accessible to all users.

2. Run QuickTime

Once you are done with installation, restart all applications running QuickTime — these could be iTunes, QuickTime Player, web-browsers, etc. That’s it!

Now you can playback videos of these formats using QuickTime. For AVI, WMV, FLV and other common formats use Elmedia Player for Mac.

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