I use the SMBv3 protocol including signing and encryption (for reasons).
The performance of Infuse on SMBv3 with signing & encryption is not overwhelming.
If I am lucky I get ~9MB/s.
For 95% of my movie collection this is sufficient.
For 5% unfortunately not.
These 5% are bogging down and are no fun.
I was able to improve the situation a bit by enabling the omission of searches monitoring feature.
Now Infuse delivers constant ~11MB/s.
It’s definitely not the SMB server.
This one manages considerably more.
It’s probably also not the latest generation ATV itself.
Why I think it’s Infuse?
Because I can communicate from other devices to the server with multi gigabit speed and because other apps on the ATV with the same settings (SMBv3, encryption & signing) reach higher speeds.
Will we see an improvement in SMB speed in future updates?
That would make me (and probably many other users) happy.
Full packet encryption generally isn’t required for a local network, and can lead to much slower speeds when streaming video.
If you want to keep this enabled on the server but disable it for Infuse only you can adjust the SMB version in Infuse from Auto to SMB2. This option is found under the Advanced section of the share’s settings.
My parents and siblings also access my NAS ( over WAN), which is why I encrypt everything. For this, I have decided not to use a VPN tunnel. This is not possible with some internet connections (no public IP). Yes, the speed decreases, but that is not due to the NAS. This has much more computing power. It is also not directly on the ATV. This would also manage more. If I use other SMB apps on the ATV and do a speed test, I get much higher data rates. So it’s the combination of Infuse and the implementation of the SMB.
I can’t speak for other apps, but it may be they do not support full packet encryption which is why the speeds are higher. Having this enabled will dramatically lower the maximum possible speeds, so it’s usually best to disable it when streaming larger files.
Also, instead of SMB, you may consider using WebDAV as this is better suited for remote streaming.