It’s a shame that Infuse can’t use VLC to search through a large collection. Infuse Pro takes several minutes with a spinning circle that’s going to cut a hole in my OLED screen (joke) whereas VLC reads the whole thing in a few seconds (>20K recordings) and put them all in alphabetical or date order! VLC is not pretty like Infuse, but it too plays e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g you can throw at it. All that’s missing is some of the stuff like keeping a note of how far in to a progie you are or telling you you’ve already watched it, etc.
Is it really necessary to read the entire contents of a large collection every single time you turn it on or merely change say, e.g. from TV to Other and back? Can’t it use some of the massive memory in the TV4K or even write an index for it’s use in the NAS to keep a permanent reference that just gets updated in the background whilst it’s playing something?
Regarding metadata - Surely a bit of AI could cope with various naming schemes. A lot of mine are CamelCase, some titles are period or underscore separated which VLC has no trouble with, and to be fair, at least in my situation, so does my Infuse Pro with just about everything to do with metadata turned off. But, geez, it’s as slow as a wet weekend!
I have a QNAP NAS with 10TB storage, not the biggest or fastest around, but VLC just flies through the collection while Infuse crawls and should be better.
If you’re browsing directly via folders (IE not through the Infuse library) you can improve the loading times of larger folder by disabling the ‘Smart Folders’ feature in Infuse.
Thanks for your help. It’s grayed out for me. Is there a way to export the Infuse library structure in diagrammatic form as well all the settings to see if my mind’s-eye picture of Infuse’s directory structure is factual? My NAS is basically just folders “Movies”, “Series” and “TV”, each with a (big) bunch of folders named to match the shows within, then each folder only contains files with filenames following the “ShowName - SxxExx - Episode Name (empty if no ep name)”. “Movies” has only got alpha naming by show name (no ep’s of course). There may be spaces or not (mostly not), periods or dashes or underscores as separators, mostly in CamelCase. I’ve tried to write filters for a couple of re-naming apps without success, so it is the mixed bunch that it is. I have recently found a function called Recase in the great file manager XYplorer, but it’s still based on Regex code and too time-consuming for this mere mortal to learn
Due to how the Smart Folders feature works, this can only be enabled/disabled when adding a new share. Once a share has been added you would need to remove it and re-add it in order to change the setting.
The title case of filenames won’t matter much, but for TV series you would want to use one of the recommended naming styles to ensure Infuse is able to properly match these to titles listed on TMDB.
A list of the recommended naming styles can be found here.
I’ve ticked this as the possible solution for someone, but it’s no good for me - too many naming variants over the years, too many files, and no actual app I can find for PC that has AI to rename all files intelligently. My files have names that (English-speaking) humans can read easily so I’m amazed that no renaming app has been successful so far.
