I’ve been writing media playback software for almost 20 years. This is pre- YouTube history here. Pre-encoding ladders and bitrate switching.
The playback stack in this application seems to have a few race conditions or other problems relating to trying to process media slower than real time. If the real-time bitrate exceeds the network capacity, the Infuse app rarely recovers correctly and often goes into a long blocked state until eventually throwing a playback error.
I connected my Apple TV using the wired network and that all went away. And when I say this problem happens all of the time, I mean ALL OF THE TIME on high bitrate content (100GB videos). Please spend the time and invest in testing the network stack and race conditions better.
I agree with your point that infuse often experiences frozen screen issues when the network environment is not very stable. Specifically, when the network is weak, after playing a video, the playback interface often freezes and cannot exit immediately, showing a lagging effect. In some network environments, even after the video has been cached, when you drag the progress bar into the cached range, it lags for a few seconds before displaying the video. However, this does not happen when dragging the progress bar the second time.
On the Apple TV, playback gets into this almost “deadlock” state which after several minutes crashes completely. When a particular media is in this deadlock loading state, closing the media and re-opening does not reset the playback mechanism or clear the deadlock. You have to wait for it to fully crash or forcibly close Infuse.
If you’re seeing any issues with playback, please send in a report from your device (and post the code here) so we can look further into what may be going on.
It would include some historical info, but how far back this goes can depend quite a bit on how much the app is used. If you’re able to reproduce the issue and send in a report right after that would probably be best.
As shown in the video demo, when the internet speed is too slow and Infuse needs to re-buffer, the whole screen will freeze. The “Advanced” sub-menu in the settings can’t be clicked, and clicking the exit playback button has no effect.
Feedback code 1AP0S
I reproduced it on mine by going back to WIFI. My code was N8ZX4
Another side effect of this is if you manage to exit the video any subsequent playback will never start until the video playback system fully fails (after 5 minutes or so)