This is a shame. I absolutely love Perian and it has made it much easier to just play content without having to download VLC as well, and it just worked.
One thing I have noticed is that support for MKV/VP8/WebM has always been pretty bad. It uses a LOT of CPU time and in general was really slow. When YouTube put me in the HTML 5 beta it was unbeknownst to me sending me WebM content because I had Perian installed and it was causing HUGE spikes in CPU usage and overall lag because it was trying to decode and render WebM, whereas h264 requires almost no CPU power on my older MBP.
I hope that the community as a whole picks up the project and helps it succeed, it would be fantastic to still have it around.
Under the heading "Frequently Asked Questions" on the linked page, it says:
Why does it take so long for MKV to load?
QuickTime expects to know the location of every single frame in a movie in order to play it. This is easy with its native format, MOV/MP4, but more difficult for several others, including MKV. Perian has to read in the entire file in order for seeking and playback to work.
That's probably (part of) the reason MKV and WebM are slow for you (since WebM uses the MKV container format).
A symptom of this issue is that you have to wait before you can start playing the movie. So if you wanted to play a 1 GB mkv the player had to read the whole 1 GB from disc once, which took a fair amount of time back in the days.
Afaik playback performance is not affected by this. Poor playback performance is mainly related to the lack of hardware acceleration (and codec optimizations) people take for granted since h.264 matured on OS X.
Let's be clear: we're not killing Perian, we're just done actively developing it. For my part, I'll work to keep it functional as it breaks on versions of OS X I use, but I'm lagging by a full major version these days because I really only need OS X for the unix layer, and Apple isn't moving the platform in a direction that makes life easy for things like Perian (which we'll never be able to meaningfully codesign as an app, for example).
I did a little bit [just a little] research on this, and I believe the main reason those things are slow is because Apple refuses to provide an API to allow 3rd parties to use the GPU for decoding video. Apple itself provides a codec for h264 that uses your graphics card, so that one performs well.
Eh? AFAIK, Accelerate.framework doesn't do anything with the GPU -- its "just" a set of highly optimized functions for math/DSP/image processing operations.
vImage is not GPU accelerated and provides no useful operations for decoding video. You may be thinking of OpenCL, which also provides no useful operations for decoding video, or VideoDecodeAcceleration, which is already supported by QuickTime and needs no further 3rd party support.
One thing I have noticed is that support for MKV/VP8/WebM has always been pretty bad. It uses a LOT of CPU time and in general was really slow. When YouTube put me in the HTML 5 beta it was unbeknownst to me sending me WebM content because I had Perian installed and it was causing HUGE spikes in CPU usage and overall lag because it was trying to decode and render WebM, whereas h264 requires almost no CPU power on my older MBP.
I hope that the community as a whole picks up the project and helps it succeed, it would be fantastic to still have it around.