Perian for the win!
What is Perian? Perian is a codec that lets you play various file/media types under quicktime, Apple’s flagship media player, editor, etc. For example, if you have encoded some of your DVD movies into DivX format, Perian will play them in quicktime.
What’s that got to do with the Apple TV? Well the Apple TV only plays mpeg-4 / H.264 media. What good is that if you have a huge collection of other-format media? Get Perian on your Apple TV asap! (see www.awkwardtv.org for information on how)
Where are we going with this? Okay, okay. The real, reason behind this post. I figured something cool out! I’ve been using Handbrake to rip some of my own purchased DVD movies to disk. I’m ripping them to H.264 (mpeg-4) and then playing them with my Apple TV, only, hang on! Some, if not all of these movies look a little “dark” on my Apple TV. When watching them, they look DARK. I checked it out on my Macbook Pro, same thing! really dark compared to the orginal DVD! Striving for quality I did some reasearch. It’s not a Handbrake issue, it’s more of a Quicktime issue. I read somewhere that the easiest fix (apart from adjusting brightness on your display) is to install the latest version of Perian component on your machine. I did it on my Macbook Pro and wow, it worked! Don’t ask me anything technical about it, I don’t really know what Perian has to do with mpeg-4 / H.264 I didn’t even know it was used to decode these formats. But it works.
I previously had Perian 0.5 on my mac, installing version 1 really helped. I erased the Perian off my Apple TV and installed the latest version that I had on my mac. bingo, looking great!
I forget where I found this information, it was in some random forum. Thanks to whoever!
