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QuickTime on Snow Leopard is better than ever; lighter, faster and better for watching videos. But if QuickTime Player can’t open the movie, what good is it? Perian is a must-have tool that allows QuickTime to play many more formats, including (but not limited to) AVI, DIVX, FLV.

An open-source program, it also works in any program that uses QuickTime, so with it you can watch a large number of file formats on Front Row. It isn’t perfect, however. Even though iTunes uses QuickTime, it won’t allow you to add AVI and other non-supported file types to your library. So, you’ll have to use QuickTime and not iTunes to view the movies.

While there are many QuickTime components that do what Perian does, Perian seems to contain most of the needed support that QuickTime doesn’t have. And yet, even though Perian is dubbed as the “swiss army knife of QuickTime components,” you may still have trouble opening a certain type of movie. VLC media player is your best bet when Perian fails. The player isn’t as attractive as QuickTime, but I’ve never had an issue with it.