A little dissapointed

General
1

Infuse 2 for iOS is undoubtedly a nice media player for the iOS platform, however the new features that were promising have proven to be underwhelming at this stage.

Admittedly, I held out using the app until version 2, so I can’t speak for previous version, but I had been hoping that version 2 would allow me to use my ipad as my main media player, and remove the jailbreak on my ATV2 and just airplay.  It seems that this is not destined to be at this stage.

After struggling for some time to connect to my NAS (WD Mybook World Edition)*, I see that my movies just show up in a list, no library view, no metadata, no sorting, no watched indicators.  I understand some of these are coming, but I really was expecting something more akin to the ATV version.  Watched indicators are a must, as are being able to sort not just by name - how about by date added as in infuse for ATV.

  • connect to NAS was difficult, again I was expecting an ATV experience of autodiscovery.  More guidance in the help section is needed here.

Airplay is not great at all.  For a media player that boasts HD playback, I am somewhat dissapointed that airplay is implemented using the mirroring protocol (as many other iOS media players do), which even on SD proves to be jerky.  I realise that there’s a lot going on in the background, but other apps can stream video from the internet a lot faster and use ‘true’ airplay to send HD video to the ATV - I wonder if this is a file format issue?  

If so, is there a recommended file format to get the best out of airplay streaming?  It would be a shame and pain to transcode all my movies to take advantage of this feature, especially as infuse boasts being able to play a multitude of formats. If I were to do that, I might as well convert to itunes and be done with it. Or are there recommended minimum hardware requirements for smooth streaming? Is my ipad 2 and ATV2 connected via airport express too slow?

 

As I say, I understand some features are still to come, but the airplay is awful IMO.  It looks like I’m going to have to keep my jailbreak on my ATV2 for the time being.  It’s a good job I don’t have an ATV3!

2

Hi, thanks for your comments.

Most of what you’re describing is actually in the works, it just wasn’t quite ready in time for the release of 2.0.

With regarding to AirPlay, Infuse has 2 different methods: Native and mirroring. Native AirPlay can be used for pretty much any video that is h.264, even MKV and AVI formats. Since AirPlay is an h.264-only protocol, the rarer formats will need to use mirroring in order to AirPlay.

Hope this helps.

3

Thank you for your reply James.  Reading back my initial post, I may have come across as overly negative or harsh.  This wasn’t my intent - just trying to feed back some constructive criticism from my initial impressions and subsequent dissapointment.

Not quite a jailbreak replacement yet!

4

No worries at all. We appreciate the feedback. :slight_smile:

5

From what i can tell now unless the video is transcoded which really does limit quality, at least for me then you can’t airplay non apple approved file types. Blame apple for being so locked down. Honeslty it is ridiculous that somethign like infuse is even needed at all

6

I agree that technology provided by infuse shouldn’t be necessary, but I don’t think we can put all the blame at Apple’s feet.

The preferred Apple formats, h.264 mp4, m4v etc are universal. It seems, after reseach, that avi is a legacy microsoft format. Just because a file format is widespread, it doesn’t make it universal.  I see the same thing at work (graphic designer).  You wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve been asked if I can supply a design I’ve painstakingly crafted in InDesign as a word file!  Word is not a generic format!!!

7

I’ve got the same devices as you, and I was a little too fast on trigger to update the ATV 2 to newest firmware, and loose my jailbreak because I thought I wouldn’t need it anymore.
I was wrong, and I hope to see an update that reflects all suggestions in your post.

@ James: looking very forward to your next update! Any ETA of it? :slight_smile:

EDIT: I’m happy to read the updated version is submitted to Apple already!