Perian - The Quicktime PlugIn to solve all codec woes
This is something the mac community might have been looking for for a long time without realising the need - a quicktime component that solves most codec woes and put your personal Quicktime Installation into the "I can play ALL codecs" category without VLC or other 3rd party apps that are fine but never good enough for some reason...
Download it here.
Its piss easy to install, no restart required, you get a very nice pref pane where you can update the component when you feel like its necessary or have it done automatically for you and it just generally works great and feels very integrated and doesn΄t lag the quicktime app with difficult files.
From the about page:
Perian aims to provide a single package for all your playback needs. It is a collection of QuickTime components incorporating several libraries:
libavcodec, from the ffmpeg project, along with code from the old FFusion component:
MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2
DivX
3ivx
H.264
Flash Video
Flash Screen Video
VP6
H263I
VP3
HuffYUV
ffvhuff
MPEG-1 & 2 Video
Fraps (up to v4)
Windows Media Audio v1 & v2
Flash ADPCM
Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska)
MPEG Layer I and II audio
DTS Coherent Acoustics audio
Snow wavelet video
libavformat, from the ffmpeg project. along with AVIImporter.component:
AVI file format
FLV file format
libmatroska, along with matroska-qt.component:
MKV file format
Subtitles:
SSA file format
SRT file format
liba52, via A52Codec:
AC3 audio