We use Infuse for my kids’ video library on their iPads. It works great, especially being able to download their favorite videos so they can watch them on road trips.
However, right now the videos are 4K or 1080P BluRay-quality. This eats a ton of space on their meager 16GB iPads, and they end up only being able to store a few at a time.
Since Infuse can already transcode a video, is there a way to combine that with the download feature, so that once it downloads it also downscales and/or reduces the bitrate so something like 720p YouTube-ish? That way they may be able to store 4x as many videos on the same device.
Preferably I would like to do this in the Infuse app itself w/o needing to fuss around w/ ffmpeg or etc. I looked around but couldn’t find this in the settings, but it also seems like such an obvious thing that people would want. Is there any way to do this in the app?
Converting videos can be a fairly intensive process, and isn’t really suitable for battery powered devices such as the iPhone or iPad due to the load it can place on the device.
Infuse doesn’t actually transcode anything. External servers like Plex have that capability. Infuse is a client-only bit of software that simply decodes and plays back content in the format it lives in — but it does this very well, with very robust support for all sorts of different encodings.
ffmpeg is definitely the way to go for this, because it gives you all the different quality options you can choose from.
And even players like Plex which do perform transcoding, it’s not the transcoding you’d want for storage – because they have to transcode faster than the speed of the media itself, they do it in a way that prioritizes quality over filesize, because there simply isn’t enough time to do effective compression, while a large stream is fine to send over a local Wi-Fi network.