[1] It was a joint development of several earlier open source components based on the multiplatform FFmpeg project's libavcodec and libavformat, as well as liba52 and libmatroska.

Before it was discontinued, it was featured as the "Download of the Day" on Lifehacker,[2] as well as on several popular blogs including Ars Technica[3] and The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

[5] In the announcement, they recommended that users look to other products, such as Niceplayer, VLC or MPlayer OS X.

They indicated that Perian's source code would be posted online for any developer who wanted to continue with the project.

One continuation based on the source code is actively maintained but does not support QuickTime for OS X Mavericks or later.