Perian to Retire After a Final Update

From the Perian homepage:

We began the Perian project over 6 years ago. We wanted to simplify viewing your content. Our team has attained that goal and with that in mind, Perian will be retired soon. Our stewardship has been a blast but it’s time for all of us to move on.

When I first purchased my Mac, Perian was one of the must-have applications that should’ve been installed as part of your initial setup alongside Quicksilver, MacFUSE, and Growl. Perian, the can-play-anything System Preferences drop-in, was considered essential for anyone with folders of DivX files (even though it could play so much more). While Perian’s developers are dropping support for the over six year old product, the OS X community will have the chance to maintain the product once Perian’s source code is shared after development ends.

Starting 90 days after the final Perian release, we will no longer provide support. We’ll wrap up our loose ends, pack up our bags, and move on to new and exciting projects.

Perian’s developers are asking that the community step forward to handle support requests, and they are directing new users to download Niceplayer as an alternative. Perian should continue to work on Lion as time permits, but its compatibility with Mountain Lion is undetermined. The source code will be posted to Google Code or GitHub soon for developers to learn from. If developers are interested in maintaining Perian, the #perian IRC room on irc.freenode.net will provide a hub where developers can communicate, ask questions, and get in contact with the founders. As it stands right now, Perian’s development will end within the next few months.