I’m hoping I give all the info needed. I’m on an Apple iPad iPadOS 26 with Infuse Pro 8.3.2. My files are on a NAS on the local LAN that I add via SMB. It is the typical tree structure of files / folders. If it matters, the NAS is using ZFS.
One folder is named byPerson and it has nothing but folders inside of it with the names of people: Joe Smith, Bob Jones, … All of them have multiple videos, usually mp4 videos inside of them. All of them but a few show up in the byPerson list as the folder icon with the name under it. This is what I want. But four of them are listed as one of the videos inside the folder. For example, the “Bob Jones” folder might have a.mp4, b.mp4, c.mp4. But the listing of byPerson will pick one, lets say b.mp4, and in the byPerson list, “Bob Jones” will not be listed at all but b.mp4 will be listed alphabetized by its name: b.mp4. I can’t figure out what is special about these four folders. Can someone help me solve this mystery?
None of my files have much to do with movies or tv shows although some do. I’m using it mostly as a way to view the videos.
Settings => General => Metadata Fetching is off and I have cleared the Metadata several times.
I have even gone as far as to look at the EXIF data and the videos that Infuse is picking to use (i.e. b.mp4 in the example above) do not have any attributes that other video files have that are not treated specially.
I’ve experimented this morning with Infuse trying to figure out what is the trigger and it just seems like it must be a bug(s).
It has something to do with the first video file within the subdirectory. To fix the problem in the four instances I put a 01.mp4 file within the directory. Then I deleted all of the favorites having to do with the SMB mount as well as deleting the stored metadata and that cured the problem.
One of the misbehaving instances does not have any underscores or other special characters in the name of the file. Three of the four instances have the name of the person somewhere in the file name of the first video file in the directory: two at the front and one at the end. e.g. ‘Joe Black/Joe Block hits home.mp4’ but the other does not. The other does have a lot of underscores and dashes in its name so maybe that hits a different bug.
BUT… there are countless of other instances (85 instances in fact) which Infuse doesn’t get confuse. They have the name of the person at the front of the file name of the first item within the directory (for example). It all just seems utterly random – buggy. And there seems to be no way to turn off the insanity.