Diffusing my Infuse issues

Ever since streaming music in the cloud became a reality, I yearned for the same with movies. It would be my movie collection dream come true. Anything of yours available from anywhere at the click of a button.

Everyone harped the abilities of Plex but I couldn’t adjust to it. I was ignorant of naming conventions and server agents etc. It just didn’t do it for me. Enter Infuse.

Infuse was a breath of fresh air. A nice clean interface on the Apple TV that gave me access to my then local server based collection. I loved it so much I became a beta developer, anxious to get the next updates as soon as possible.

And then collections were introduced, which I personally disliked. Even worse was the inability to change the collection artwork. It became such a bug bear that I was driven back to Plex.

I took time out to understand the server application better than I had done before. Guilt set in. I was betraying my Infuse patronage. But Plex offered me and my wants so much more. And that’s how it stayed for many many months. Until Infuse incorporated the ability to access your Plex Server.

The Plex client on TVOS, though clean in design, has a lot of issues. Especially when playing back HEVC files. Despite my Collections issue with Infuse, it would almost always play whatever you threw at it. So, I went back to Infuse.

But so many of the niggling issues I had with the app were still apparent, and after having used Plex for so many months, they were much more troublesome.

Infuse is a beautiful and simple app to use that is very efficient at playback but I personally feel like the UI does not take into account handling large collections. For example, and this is possible my biggest annoyance, when browsing movies with the ATV remote you could be scrolling down slowly and then all of a sudden you double tap by accident and you’re at the bottom of your list. And then you spring back right to the top again. And sometimes down again for good measure. I think this feature should be removed or have the ability to disable it as it is so frustrating. I would much rather there be an Alphabet list on the right hand side of the screen for quick access further down.

Other issues are more absences. I would love to see a list of the actors underneath the film card screen and recommendations based on selected content rather than an A-Z list of all the films. I never ever navigate the collection by means of the latter.

Then, and yes I know it is early days, the integration of Plex currently fails me. The library never updates unless I go into the specific folder and wait for it to update itself. But the home screen never seems to have the latest movies added or the correct on deck items.

So, I have gone back to Plex but via another app which seems to have met all my needs. I do miss Infuse. I think playback is always way more reliable within it. I think it has an incredible amount of great things going for it. It’s just the few niggles that I would have thought would have been ironed out by now… well, they’re still present. Until they change and if they change… I don’t think I will be using it.

Now, I appreciate everything is subjective and the maintenance of this app is probably vast… so I say this all respectfully and hopeful that the developers may read and take note as there may be others who share the same opinions.

Thanks for the feedback.

We’ve had some other similar requests, and are planning to work towards integrating many of the features you described in upcoming versions.

One thing we do have coming in the next 5.8.1 version is instant updates from Plex, which will ensure Infuse is always up-to-date with the latest videos you have added. We expected 5.8.1 to be available on the App Store within the next few days.