Admittedly, I have a large library (200+ TV episodes, and 20K movies). I really want to like Infuse, but, even with metadata turned ‘off’, Infuse takes an extremely long time (4 days) to ‘fetch details’ from the server.
Do you have Infuse connected to Plex or are you connecting directly?
Since Infuse doesn’t require a server, many of the tasks a server normal does in the background Infuse will do on its own.
The fetching details part you are seeing likely refers to fetching things like video resolution, specs, runtime, etc… This will be the slowest part of indexing, though if you are using iCloud sync will be saved so it only has to run once (other devices can access this, and it will be available if you switch devices or have to reinstall the app for some other reason).
One trick I do with the ATV is first, set the sleep to never and turn off CEC so you can turn off the tv without turning off the ATV. Then start Infuse, go to the library screen and there you can watch the progress messages.
I’d also recommend you turn metadata back on so you get it as a base to work with and like James said the details is the longest so gathering the metadata isn’t bad.
The ATV is at the mercy of the time Apple gives it in the background which is minimal and there is still a problem with Infuse doing background updates so doing the above will let the ATV churn out the first scan pretty quick (about 4 hours for me with 20K + videos).
Yes, it’s connected to a Plex share. iCloud sync definitely is not simplifying the process. I have to go through this on all 3 of my ATV’s. If it’s done on one, it’s not done on the others and I have to do it all again.
With Plex, iCloud sync won’t be used since Infuse will rely on the Plex server for metadata and to sync things like watched status and ratings.
One thing you can do is to disable the ‘Pre-Cache Images’ option found under the Advanced section of the share settings page in Infuse. Doing this will avoid an extra step, and just fetch images on-the-fly as needed from Plex.