The death of Perian is bittersweet for Mac users. On one hand, the open-source Swiss Army knife of video codecs will be missed by millions of video junkies who relied on its seamless integration with QuickTime to play media files that were otherwise ignored. On the other, its demise seems to be due to a lack of necessity; as the iPad and iPhone have grown in popularity, so have their video formats--namely MPEG4 and H.264--pushing lesser-known codecs to the background.