Perian and 10.6

[Mr VacBob]

Perian 1.1.4 is compatible with 10.6. We don't have to rewrite it or anything.

The only problem most people will notice is that mkv files will not open in QuickTime Player 10. This is not a problem with the component; QT Player 10 only accepts file types that have been registered as movie files with the system, which 1.1.4 doesn't do. I haven't tested with the release yet, but installing NicePlayer or this application will fix it. It's not necessary to open files with them; just having a copy on the disk is enough, but it may be necessary to start the application once to register it. This will be done automatically in the next Perian update.

QuickTime Player 7 is an optional install in 10.6 and should work perfectly.

The audio codecs (such as AC3) may not work in all 64-bit applications - we haven't tested this yet.

Update: Front Row subtitles are broken again due to a typo - this is also fixed in SVN.

[fazekaim]

It works woth QTX! Thanks a lot!

[marwaw]

When You release version for Snow Leopard with Front Row and subtitles support ?
regards

[jsevakis]

I'm having a small number of minor problems under Leopard, particularly under QTX. Some of them are just design issues relating to the new player.

QT Player X doesn't have the Movie Properties screen. While the app does have an option to select audio track and subtitles, they're not being properly found inside MKV files; you're pretty much stuck with the defaults.

In QTX, MKV files with SSA subtitle tracks that render a larger area than the video window (for example, the video is 720x480 resized to 640x480, and the subtitles are 720x540) will result in a white border being rendered outside the video.

Linked MKV files are not being connected in either QT version.

Strangely, the first time I started QT Player I was having myriad video rendering issues, but they all seemed to resolve themselves. Could 10.6 be magically self-healing?

[juicybiscuit]

None of my mp4's / m4v's that have AC3 audio will open in Quicktime X - assuming this is a Perian issue...... ?

[frankiedp]

I cant seem to get .divx files to play under QT10 "QuickTime Player cannot open files of this type", but they do open in Front Row

[malakov8]

thanks a ton. just having this on your disk fixes everything.

[chimp]

hi, after upgrading to 10.6 I don't get any image on frontrow when playing videos, only a black screen with subtitles. Quicktime works.
Anyone knows a workaround to this?

[chris keck]

I'm having a problem similar to that reported by "chimp" except that it happens when I export MKV videos for playing on my Apple TV.

hi, after upgrading to 10.6 I don't get any image on frontrow when playing videos, only a black screen with subtitles. Quicktime works.

The resulting .m4v file has sound and subtitles, but the video is blank.

[chimp]

I forgot to mention I have sound also. All the videos I tried are divx or xvid formats.
But still only a black screen with subtitles (and sound).

[ctalibard]

None of my mp4's / m4v's that have AC3 audio will open in Quicktime X - assuming this is a Perian issue...... ?

I'd guess it's a QT X problem.

I think it's worth clarifying the difference between Quicktime, and Quicktime Player. The latter being an application that uses the former to play and record videos. Also rather confusingly, even if you didn't install Quicktime 7 from the optional installs, you still got it because it's essential for SL to work properly. The optional install really should have been called Quicktime Player 7.

QT X has no plugin capability, support for only a few modern codecs, and no basic editing ability. So, in Quicktime Player X, operations (like trimming) and containers (like mkv) not supported by the QTX infrastructure are delegate to a separate 32-bit QT 7 based process which decodes and returns the data. This is why certain videos that require Perian seem to work in Quicktime X. The truth of the matter is that they work in Quicktime Player X, and are being handled under-the-hood by the QT 7 infrastructure.

The problem with m4v's seems to me to be that QT X thinks it can handle that container, and when it can't (because it's got AC3 audio) it fails to delegate the handling of it to QT 7.

EDIT: As somebody helpfully pointed out, although 99% of hte above is still accurate, the issue with m4v's is different because A52Codec is a CoreAudio plugin and therefore theortically available to QTX. However it's not 64-bit so therefore it cannot be loaded into a 64-bit app. Apparently AC3 will work under certain conditions if you run Quicktime Player X in 32-bit mode until a 64-bit version of A52Codec is available.

[chris keck]

I tested playing an MKV file in Frontrow to see if I could verify "chimp's" issue. Here's what I found.

MKV files play normally in both QT Player 7 and QT Player X (after downloading Open in QT Player).

Playing MKV files in Frontrow produces sound and subtitles, but no image (the same as "chimp" reported).

Exporting MKV files from both QT Player 7 and QT Player X using the Apple TV settings produces files with sound and subtitles, but no video. The files are much smaller than what I expect based on past experience.

I'm mostly ignorant of the details of Quicktime technology, but based on the behavior I see I'd guess that whatever process in QT that exports the video track, either to Frontrow or to be reencoded, has stopped working with 10.6 and Perian.

Does anyone else see this problem with their system, or is it something unique to "chimp" and me?

[chimp]

Yesterday on IRC one of the developers said something like "issue fixed in svn"... but he wouldn't give any other info... I found out svn is something like unreleased versions or something. In perian website there's a Subversion Repository under Develop section, wich I think could be this svn thing... But inside there I can find only a bunch of files that I think it's the source for perian or something like that...

Well, can anyone here with more knowledge explain how we could use these files to repair our perian so it will work under 10.6 frontrow?

Or could this "issue fixed in svn" setence mean that they will release a fix soon?

thanks.

[gbooker]

Yesterday on IRC one of the developers said something like "issue fixed in svn"... but he wouldn't give any other info

This statement comes across as the developer refusing to give more information. Here's the chat transcript:

23:38 < chimp> hi people
23:39 < chimp> are you aware of perian not working with frontrow since 10.6?
23:40 < chimp> I get no video anymore, only audio and subtitles.
23:40 < chimp> just thought I'd let you know
23:41 < chimp> I'd love a fix for that also...
23:41 < chimp> thanks!
23:42 < astrange> fixed in svn, no real workaround (well, actually you can edit the system version, but you'll forget to change it back and something else will break)
23:43 < chimp> what's svn?
23:55 < chimp> ok, i get it, but there is only the source... I have no idea how to turn this into a .prefPane file
Day changed to 02 Sep 2009
00:07 < chimp> well, I sure hope you guys fix it.
00:08 < chimp> good night and thanks for your work so far.
00:08 -!- chimp [<redacted>] has quit []

You actually answered your own question as to what svn was; it is the source code. The nature of irc is that people tend to reply in the long term, so if you had waited, you likely would have been told what's needed to build from the source (I would have if I wasn't busy).

Or could this "issue fixed in svn" setence mean that they will release a fix soon?

It means the issue has been fixed in the source code. It doesn't say anything about a release. There are other 10.6 issues which need resolution before we can do a release.

[chimp]

I'm sorry If I wasn't clear. English isn't my native language, so sometimes I may not use the best words.
I never intended to say the developer refused to answer or something like that, only that it seemed that he was away or something.
I answered my own question because I found out what the answer was before someone would answer me...

Also, I may be wrong, but I think compiling something from source is something difficult that only developers and people who know programming tend to know, so I didn't even bother trying to learn that.

I know all you guys do a great work and I'm very thankful for it. Once again I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear.
Finally, I will patiently wait for an update that fixes this issues and stop bothering you about this.

[raytw]

I think I must be very lucky. I can view all videos with sound in Front Row without any problems in Mac OS 10.6. I've also used QuickTime Player X in conjunction with Perian to convert MKV files for my Apple TV and they also work perfectly. I've no idea why there should be any problems. Trouble is, there are now so many bits and pieces in the operating system that it can be tricky to know exactly what's happening. All I can say is that I don't have Rosetta enabled and I've used XSlimmer on all my applications, so there's probably not much in the way of 'old' code hanging around.

Edit: I've just found that QuickTime Player X refuses to open m4v files that only have an AC3 soundtrack but is happy with such files that contain both AAC and AC3 tracks, whilst QT Player 7 is happy with both. Most odd.

By the way, how is it that running NicePlayer allows QuickTime Player X to open MKV files? How are movie files registered and where are the files containing this information? I'd like QT Player X to play MP2s and other files as well, so any help would be much appreciated!

[SHRIKEE]

I have many .mov files with h.264 and AC3 or other perianized formats and not much work in Snow Leopard. ALL work in Leopard.
As a testing machine i have a mid 2007 iMac 20", a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with Snow Leopard and a Early 2008 MacBook Pro with Leopard.

Simple avi files with stereo sound work fine. But that's about it.
Basically for me this means that ALMOST ANY dvd-rip and Bluray rip i have is not playable. Most of the silly 700MB avi's seem to work, same for the 350MB tv-show episodes.

I'm not blaming anyone here, just saying Perian seems not really compatible with SL (Maybe i'm wrong here! I don't know for sure). I hope the devs fix it soon with new codecs. And for that, many thanks in advance!!

Some files 4+ GB in size, 720p or higher:
.mov h.264 video, DTS sound. No video, crackled sound and player crashes immediately
.mov h.264 video, AC3 5.1 sound. No video, sound starts, player crashes almost immediately.
.mov h.264 video, AC3 stereo sound. No video, sound works but player crashes after a few seconds.

And these, under 2GB, lower resolutions:
.avi xVid video, AC3 5.1 sound. Works fine
.avi DivX 5 video, MPEG-Layer 3 sound. Works fine
.mp4 h.264 video, AAC 2 channel sound. Works fine
.avi DivX 5 video, MPEG-Layer 3 sound. No video, good sound. player doesn't crash.

Keep in mind that ALL these films worked fine on Leopard, Perian 1.1.4 and QT player 7. Now they either work or don't work as stated in both QT player X and 7. X also tried in 32bit mode.

I kind of fail to see a pattern here. But maybe it's of use.

[gbooker]

Shrikee,
What is the encoding settings for your 720p H.264?

If it's high profile, perhaps Apple has decided to ignore any H.264 streams they don't make again. Apple's H.264 codec in the past was good at crashing on any high profile content. The later versions in QT 7 stopped crashing and actually played the content, but did so at an outright pathetic frame rate. Perhaps they went back to crashing again on high profile content when they wrote the QTX component?

The only piece that doesn't fit the above possible explanation is the last avi file, which seems similar to the second.

[SHRIKEE]

Gbooker, thanks for the reply!

I'm not sure what the specific details are as they high res mov files i have were downloaded as MKV. I then stripped out anything i didn't want with QT player 7 pro. Say japanese audio or french subs and such... THen saved the movie as a selfcontained thing using simply "save as" from the QT player menu. This passed through the original video and other streams i wanted without having to bother with MKV afterwards. This gave me nice and sleek .mov files. I never really looked at encoding details.

[gbooker]

While I cannot provide anything other than conjecture here, I would guess they are high profile H.264 since I know that the TV-shows that are 720p MKV are high profile (weighing in at about 1G for 45min). I'm betting it's going into Apple's decoder which is crashing on High Profile streams again.

BTW, what video cards do those machines have? Does it crash on all of them?