Because this feature requires a redesign of of the UI and the library database. It’s a structual change.
Which in itself is another heavily requested (and very much needed) feature.
As I have already tried to explain above: Infuse multiuser support on Apple TV could probably be achieved without code changes.
Just by developers enabling the “Run as Current User” entitlement in Xcode, the Apple TV operating system would provide separated application data spaces to Infuse for the different users based on their Apple ID. So the user-data related behavior of the Infuse application on Apple TV would be more equal to that of the multi-user macOS than that of single-user iOS - no changes to the app UI needed.
For further reference related to the user perspective, please see Share Apple TV with multiple users in the Apple TV User Guide or just try out the behavior of the Apple Music app which switches content based on the currently active user.
There’s also this: Supporting Multiple Users in Your tvOS App which might be very helpful for the devs has it contains all the information they need to incorporate this feature in their app.
This feature is available since tvOS 14 and we are already on tvOS 16. All the information needed to implement this has been available since 2020.
How do you fix the feature parity issue between platforms?
There are features only available on tvOS. This could be another one of those.
To be honest I don’t see the point of having this feature on macOS or iOS since those are typically devices not shared between users.
The media collection of our family is on a Jellyfin server. Everyone has their own account there. We use Infuse as a player frontend on multiple Apple devices, each with their own Apple ID.
The iDevices with iOS or iPadOS are not shared between us. We share two Macs with separate user accounts, each connected to the same personal Apple ID as on the iDevices and so with access to their own Infuse and Jellyfin profiles.
The Apple TV is shared by the whole family, but once again setup with our individual personal Apple IDs. In Gaming Center and Apple Music, the different user profiles are taken into account and everyone can access their personal content. However, Infuse always uses the default user’s Apple ID instead of that of the currently selected user. So Keep it all in sync, as described on the Infuse homepage, works for just one of the Apple TV users:
Use iCloud to keep metadata, library settings, and playback progress in sync between all your devices. Start a video on iPhone, and easily jump back in where you left off on Apple TV.
From a user perspective, no tvOS specific Infuse feature is needed, but rather a fix for an incomplete user experience. May we call it a bug?
But switching the Infuse app to the multi-user support available since tvOS 14 primarily means setting a configuration setting when building the app. And this would fix the UX issue entirely without changing the interface.
Infuse uses Trakt to do family sharing for Pro in addition to App Store family sharing.
Maybe that is a factor for them being reluctant to implement this.
What if different users include different items in their libraries?
Unlike Plex, etc., Infuse must build its databases entirely on the Apple TV in non-protected cache space. If you have four users, does that mean Infuse needs to index four different libraries?
I can see Infuse maybe being able to keep track of different users’ watched statuses, if they all share the same library database.
I think anything more might be really complicated for a client-only app that Apple only gives so much space in which to spread its wings?
I don’t think different libraries would be the way to go. However, in my “real world” (at home), I have one media storage, separated in different folders: TV, Movies, Kids Movies, Concerts etc. But we are a family of 4, two of them children. So ideally, each person could have their own profile, with their own favourites, own watching status. But all using one media source, even one library. That is how my Plex server runs at the moment (and honestly the only reason it is still operational).
It’s not ideal, and this requires Plex, or some other media manager to handle the Library management, accounts, and access, but what was suggested to me was to create multiple Plex users (like discrete accounts for each user each with their own email address, not Plex Home users ), share the things you want each of those accounts to access from your main account, and then login to Infuse using the account whose content you want.
So in my case, I had 3 Plex Home users. So I duplicated that as 3 new plex accounts, invited those plex accounts to share the libraries I wanted each to have access to (Kids, Mom, etc.), and then log Infuse into the account I want depending on which libraries I want that TV to have.
As I said, it’s not ideal, but it does work around the fact that Infuse doesn’t support Plex Home Managed Users.
Don’t forget that you need to click the like button on the first post in this thread to show your support for this suggestion!
Ah, thanks! I thought I already had, but I think it was for one of the other “Support Multiple Users in Plex Home” topics. I liked this one as well, but I’m less worried about profiles in Infuse itself and more it supporting multiple users on backend media management software (Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, etc.)
For the scenarios collected in this issue, where two or more people share Infuse on an Apple TV, Firecore has not offered viable application support for over 6 years. It saddens me that the technical possibilities under tvOS are not being exploited here. Maybe the number of affected Infuse users on Apple TV is just not relevant enough for business.
It may be a business decision: if you want two users you could create two profiles on the Apple TV and pay two licences
There are quite a few likes on the first post of this thread so I don’t suspect it is due to lack of interest. I’m not familiar with the native multi-user support on Apple TV, however, as whenever I lived with other folks (my ex, or coworkers when I was living on the road) they all just used my account.
But I suspect one of the difficulties lies with the peculiarities of Infuse as compared to other streaming services and applications such as Plex — in that Infuse is the only AppleOS application that doesn’t rely on remote server-side applications.
It’s easy for Netflix and other streamers and Plex and Emby to manage multiple accounts because their iOS apps are merely front ends to the huge servers they have that process everything from the complete UI to account logins to user preferences to metadata to program guides to configuring and managing streaming connections from source to front end … to name but a few.
Infuse is a standalone app that on Apple TV is only allowed 4GB of uneditable (except through App updates) storage for the software that must manage and perform every action listed above that otherwise is managed remotely by servers with essentially unlimited capacity — logins, metadata, complete UI configurations and resources (including its structure, graphics and art elements, coding of the interactive interfaces, scripting what happens when users select the interactive elements, the structure and integration and searching of the metadata database it must build locally, and the displaying of filtered results); plus the management of user account preferences, the simultaneous connections to multitudes of varieties of local and remote media content servers —
Which alone is far more complicated then what the Netflix app needs to given every bit of media the Netflix app accesses is on Netflix’s own server encoded and transmitted in Netflix’s own protocols
— to streaming content from all those various types of content sources (users’ own local servers, hard drives plugged into routers, remote Plex servers and cloud storage services) using any of a large variety of available transmission protocols; while needing to manage the decoding and playback of content encoded in any of dozens if not hundreds of different video, audio, and subtitle formats.
Further, the TV app is only allowed a miserly 50MB of re-writable persistent storage to save all its users’ share and app configurations.
I, of course, have no access to Infuse’s code or how it is assembled; but I wonder if the reason this feature has not yet seen the light of day is if there just might not be enough device resources made available to Infuse to manage multiple accounts.
Perhaps Infuse can comment, but I don’t suppose they are obligated to.
Yea, this is a good callout.
I’m less interested in the tvOS user switching. My specific wish was that it supported the Plex Home users API. Even if it was at the time you create the share it connects to… in the same way that I can login to a different Plex (not managed home) or Jellyfin user when I create the share.
Connect to the backend service and present the media it gives you is what it does today… I just want it to be able to talk to the Plex Managed Home User API and get the list of media that way.
Could you please explain in more detail how this is supposed to work? I have already licensed the Pro version for the whole family and everyone can use it individually on their macOS and iOS devices. Only on the Apple TV the application does not take into account the user switch.
I think Infuse still needs to build a metadata database locally; and it is only able to do this in volatile space the AppleTV might decide to delete at any time if the device starts running out of space.
That might mean having to build two separate databases if each user used different shares and has a different list of content? And still might require Infuse to overflow the persistent storage they have to preserve individual users account settings?
Maybe two different AppleTVs ?