Infuse, Plex (via Direct Play) and alternatives (Jellyfin, SMB, others?)

General
1

Hello everyone, and apologies in advance for the length of this post! :sweat_smile:
My current setup consists of:

  • Apple TV 4K 2021

  • Infuse Pro Lifetime

  • Plex Pass Lifetime

  • QNAP TVS-871, Intel i3, 8GB RAM, 8x WD RED 6TB in RAID 6

Infuse is connected to Plex via “Direct Mode,” and generally I haven’t had major issues (aside from some subtitle quirks, which I’ve discussed in other posts but never really resolved). Overall, it tends to work better than the native Plex app, especially when the audio track isn’t standard AC3 5.1.

Recently, however, Plex has proven to be unreliable, with issues on their authentication APIs. Over the past few weeks, on at least two occasions, it was impossible to access Plex locally simply because their authentication APIs were having problems. As a result, I couldn’t access my own content even though everything was on the same local network (same Wi-Fi, etc.).

This is obviously frustrating—it makes no sense to be unable to access your own Plex server from the same network just because Plex’s servers are having issues.

Yes, I’m aware there are workarounds to allow local access without authentication, but that means automatically logging into the “main” profile, and in general it’s not ideal to allow access without authentication.

So I started exploring alternatives like Jellyfin, which I had already tried in the past but ultimately ruled out because:

  • On my NAS it feels quite “heavy” and slow (I tried both the unofficial package—very slow and resource-heavy—and Docker via Container Station in QTS)

  • The interface is clearly less polished than Plex. Even with plugins and custom skins, the experience still feels less refined overall

As a fallback solution in case Plex acts up again, it could work. However, I was wondering if it’s possible to have both Plex (via “Direct Mode”) and SMB access to the NAS share coexist within Infuse.

In practice, I would have the same content available twice: once through Plex and once directly through Infuse.

Is this feasible, or would it create confusion in Infuse’s interface/results?

In the past I also tried going “Infuse-only via SMB,” but I wasn’t satisfied for several reasons:

  • Library scanning is quite slow (I have about 900 movies and 200 TV series, for a total of around 10,600 episodes)

  • Even with iCloud sync enabled, every time I opened Infuse on one of my devices (Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV), it would start scanning again—especially re-downloading metadata and artwork, which takes a long time

  • My collection is split into multiple libraries, which are nicely separated in Plex. In Infuse, however, all “TV Shows” libraries get merged together, which I don’t really like. Yes, favorites and Home screen shortcuts can help, but it’s not very practical

  • When Infuse misidentifies a movie or TV show, fixing the match is more complicated and sometimes impossible. A couple of examples:

    • Will & Grace has 11 seasons, but Infuse only recognized the first 8 and mixed the last 3 with the first 3

    • Marvel’s What If…? and Netflix’s WHAT / IF were confused and merged, with no way to properly separate them

So… what would you recommend?

Should I keep Jellyfin as a backup, or give Infuse via SMB another try?

Thanks in advance!

2

I personally use NFS, as fast as SMB without the headaches :slight_smile: you can also try FTP which has less overhead. It does take a bit of time to download things but once that’s finished then you should be good to go.

Yes infuse will have to do that on each device for downloading from TMDb. iCloud backup saves the file specs and which files aligns with with TMDb entry to speed up that part of the sync. Make sure one device fully syncs and that you have free space in iCloud before starting another device sync.

Unfortunately infuse doesn’t support segregated libraries at this time.

There is usually a way to get a match. :wink:
Looks like Will and Grace was released as two separate shows, so you will need to name the last three differently, including the year (2017) in the file name.
Again for what if, add the respective years to the file names and you should be good there. Looks like one was 2019 and the other 2021.

1 Like
3

Thanks for your replay!

So, there shouldn’t be any issues with having in Infuse the “same” content via “Plex Direct Play” and SMB/NFS network shares, right?
never tried via FTP. maybe will give it a try.

About shows matching, I get that putting the year/other info before the folder containing the files “solve” the issue… but this happens with Infuse only. In Plex (and in Jellyfin) both shows are correctly matched without any intervention/folder naming (Will&Grace has 11 seasons per TheTVDB: Will & Grace - TheTVDB.com ). And when there’s a mismatch, I simply hit the “fix match” option and that’s it.

4

Not sure if what happens if you have both connected at the same time.

Yes infuse does not use TVDB so there will be differences.

5

Ok thanks. I’ll try and figure out.
In the past I had both Plex and Jellyfin configured in Infuse at the same time without issues, so fingers crossed.

6

I added a new connection to my NAS via FTPES (via FTPS I got a “SSL connection error”).
It works and Infuse is now fetching all metadata etc.

A couple of things:

  1. it looks like that when Infuse “match” the same content I’ve already watched via Plex Direct Play, Infuse automatically marks it as watched. Nice!
  2. I get that all “TV Shows” library get merged together, but… why I can only have one “kind” of “sort”? I mean: I would like to have “Movies” sorted by “Descending airing date” and “TV Shows” by “Title”… it looks not possible with Infuse library but it’s possible with Plex Direct Mode…? I’m missing something or Infuse doesn’t allow different “sorting” option for movies/TV Shows? the latter is not really good…

[EDIT]

Point 1 was a “false positive”: look like Infuse “remembers” last time I tried to access the same share… maybe there’s something left in iCloud (I thought I had deleted everything long ago) and Infuse simply reused those data.