Banish the Perian Preference Pane

ben
Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:06:06 +0000

Perian?

Perian, the Quicktime "all-in-one" codec pack, which allows Quicktime Player (And Quicktime based applications, including Front Row) to play various extra formats, including DivX/Xvid, .mkv etc etc.

The problem

One problem - well, more of an annoyance than a problem.. With version v1.0, it started being released as a Preference Pane icon - I never have to change it's settings, so it doesn't need to be in the preferences..

I put up with it for a while, and it wasn't really that big a deal, but it was always there, taunting me.. Until one day (today, specifically) I thought "Those .component codec-files must be stored somewhere, so the pref pane can install them.", so I went to ~/Library/PreferencePanes/ (the one in my home-directory), right clicked the Perian icon, and clicked "Show package contents", after 20 seconds if digging though the files, I find "Perian.zip"... The component, archived!

Since I doubt I'm the only person annoyed by this unnecessary extra icon, I decided to put together this short guide on how to remove the Perian OS X Preference Pane icon..

The guide

Find the Perian preference pane file (Perian.prefPane). It will probably be in your home directory, Library, Prefernce Panes.

If you've not installed it, grab Perian from http://www.perian.org/ and mount the disc image, then use the prefPane within the disc image.

Right click it, click "Show Package Contents".

Go into the Contents directory, Resources, and Components/

Copy Perian.zip to your Desktop (command+c, command+v, or alt+drag the file). If you simply drag+drop, it may break the Perian pref-pane if you wish to use it again.

Extract it, trash Perian.zip

Copy the Perian.component to /Library/Quicktime/ (Or the one in your Home directory)

Repeat steps 5-7 for the zip files inside the CoreAudio/ and QuickTime/ directories in Perian.prefPane/Contents/Resources/Components/

That's it

You might want to install the preference pane first, and checking if you need to alter the settings, but the defaults it will use will be fine for 99% of people I'm sure (The current options are about "Play[ing] soft sounds", and audio-output for surround sound).

You obviously lose the only benefit from the prefernce-pane - auto-updating. Personally this doesn't bother me at all, as Perian is so rarely updated (There was almost a year between version 1.0 and the previous one), other than that, it should function the same (I've been using it for several months on both Tiger and Leopard with no adverse effects).