Hi
Before I go into the gory details of why I’m unhappy with how InFuse is handling artwork let me state, for the record, that InFuse is by far the best media player for iOS by a country mile and I love it.
But I’m a perfectionist and it can be better :), so …
I’ve just been sitting here trying to figure out the bizarre way that InFuse is handling artwork for my extremely well organized and well named movie library that follows XBMC standards to the letter.
Unfortunately, the way InFuse is dealing with Poster images just makes no sense at all and it needs to change.
After a bit of investigation I realised what’s going on and currently it’s like is:
- If InFuse finds more than 1 movie file in a folder (movie + trailer) it will show you a folder at folder level and not a cover image that takes you straight to the metadata page for the movie.
In principle that’s fine and makes sense BUT the folder it shows you doesn’t have a cover / poster image.
If your movie library is structured such that each movie is in its own folder, as is the case for many people, the expectation is that InFuse will look for any one of the common Poster file naming conventions in the folder (poster.jpg, cover.jpg, moviename.jpg etc etc) and use that as the image for the folder, but that doesn’t happen, it ignores my carefully named local artwork completely.
- If a folder only contains 1 movie file InFuse does not show you the folder at folder level, it shows you an image representing the movie instead and clicking on that image takes you directly to the metadata page for that movie.
Here again this makes sense in principle BUT once again the locally stored and carefully named poster images are completely ignored and instead what appears to be a cropped section of the fanart image is used as the poster ?!
That makes no sense at all. The appropriate thing for InFuse to do here is either:
A. Download a poster/thumb image for the movie and use that.
Or
B. Do the same thing as suggested for folder images in point 1 above and look in the folder containing the movie for any of the common poster naming conventions and use that image if you find one,
- The strangest thing of all is that if InFuse found more than 1 movie file in a folder (see point 1 above) and you go into that folder THEN it somehow manages to show you exactly the CORRECT poster image for the main movie file!
I haven’t yet determined if it’s downloading the poster image in this case or using what it finds in the local folder with the movie file, but it somehow manages to grab an appropriate poster image for the main movie,
Other movie files, like the movie trailer, don’t get a poster image, but that’s ok.
Why can it get it right in this scenario but makes a complete mess of in scenarios 1 and 2 above ? It makes no sense to me.
- It would be ideal if any movie file with the word “trailer” in the file name was given a custom trailer poster image.
You just need one cool poster sized image that clearly represents a trailer that you ship with InFuse and that you display as the poster for any file with the word Trailer in it,
If you did the things I’ve described above, the InFuse UI would work infinitely better.
I expected InFuse to automatically adhere to XBMC standards, but sadly it does not, but even worse, some of things it’s doing with artwork currently just make no logical sense.
Please fix this stuff because InFuse is an excellent app but it just needs more UI polish and better integration with existing well organized libraries and artwork.
Thanks
Allan