I’m new to Infuse, bought the year subscription, as I was told Infuse plays anything and everything, whereas Plex sometimes has issues playing 4K content on the ATV. I’ve verified Infuse plays these way better; however, I have a ton of content and it has taken about 4 weeks to fetch the metadata. I’m OK with that, but I’m trying to understand the difference here with Plex. Plex has never had to do this…I turn Plex on, and all the thumbnails etc. are just there ready to do…instantly. And no need to ‘fetch content’ from each of my 4 Plex shares. What is exactly happening in Infuse? Why does it do this and what is the benefit?
Additionally, doing a search on Infuse takes about 3 minutes. I search for a movie title and it hangs and searches for about 3 minutes before populating. Plex starts pulling up suggestions as I type instantly.
I really want to like Infuse, but just wondering if someone can help me see the light here, or is Infuse just not for me?
If performance is top priority then you might overlook some of the issues you may be seeing. Having 1 million files is putting infuse to its limit and I’m not sure something that big has quite been tested. Plex is a dedicated media server. It’s made to load stream and find stuff fast. Infuse is a frontend to plex and can do a lot of things, some better, some worse. It’s up to you to decide what you are looking for in a media player. I posted a response to some of that question here
I use Plex and Infuse, as I am sure a lot of people do.
For me, Infuse is a better player. But Plex is a better media “manager”
Plex has customisable collections.
Plex has multiple user profiles.
Plex has multiple libraries.
So i connect Infuse to a Plex server and, for now, get the best of both worlds.
Among other things, Plex has limitations on playing different files. If with infuse you can watch all the available video files, then with Plex you will sometimes encounter files that Plex does not know how to play.
And most importantly. For Plex, you must definitely set up a server. While infuse can work without a server.
In addition, infuse has the best technical support. Developers from firecore constantly watch the forum and respond in a timely manner to problems arising from users. And if the problem is infuse, they recognize it and try to fix it as soon as possible. See how often updates are released from infuse - Infuse Release Notes | Firecore and compare with the same Plex. I think it should say a lot in itself.
The developers of Plex in this regard sometimes do not behave very nicely and they try to shift the obvious problems in the Plex itself, for example, to Apple. And sometimes it takes a lot of time to fix some problems.
I get all that, but with my mega library, waiting for 3-4 minutes to search a title and the constant ‘fetching’ of content (does it HAVE to do this every time you open it?) makes it almost unusable?
I use Infuse for playback - it supports Dolby Atmos (Plex does not), it support AirPlay 2 so I can play a live concert in one room and have the audio sent to all AirPlay 2 devices in my home, etc. (Plex does not).
Plex certainly has a WAY better interface to the files, and makes it easier to find them - sometimes I will START it in Plex so as when I go to Infuse it will be in “Continue Watching”.
Infuse also supports any kind of files on my servers, so I can point it at DVD files, or BluRay files, etc - Plex does not.
Best way to handle it is search and start in Plex, then find it in “Continue Watching” in Infuse.
This might be a silly question, but did you add your Plex servers as Plex shares, or did you add them as a file share in some other way (SMB, etc)? Infuse has many ways to add files.
I never use Plex since using Infuse, and I don’t remember having had to wait for any amount of time for search results and Infuse also does background syncing so I rarely see Infuse syncing but for a few seconds (its in the app settings in ATV Settings). It used to be the case that Infuse took a while to sync, but this was before background syncing was available. I also don’t have a huge library, but it is about 50TB so its not entirely small either.
use plex server to manage the file. add file to infuse through plex server. playback in infuse ways better than plex 1000 times.
Not if remotely