Well, it started before 1.0 was even released. We started looking at methods to optimize the routines within Perian to run even faster. The road has been a bit of a long one. Now, we are in a private beta. The beta has been opened to those who have donated to the project as well as personal friends of developers. We often get the question as to why we limited the beta to donators. I find more often than not that such people are the kind who think they deserve something to which they have no right to have (see Open Source Attitudes). The reason we did this is simple. We didn’t want the beta to be fully public, but we wanted more testers. Those who have donated have already shown they use and care about the project, so they are a natural choice.