I have a carefully curated library with ~600 movies imported into iTunes. Embedded metadata, streams fully compatible with modern Apple devices, the whole shebang. I can play content directly with Apple built-in apps on iPad Pro and Apple TV 4k. Still, I want to use something like Infuse because, well, those stock apps suck.
The reason I’m writing is that for the life of me I can’t get Infuse to scan these movies without issues. I’d like to understand the logic here:
If I enable “Embedded Metadata” but disable “Metadata Fetching”, all movies are annoyingly scanned as “Other”. As if Infuse was blatantly ignoring the “Media Kind” metadata which is correctly set as “Movie”. Worse, when I tap a movie, the embedded cover isn’t shown, but rather a thumbnail of the video – I suspect this is precisely because it was detected as “Other”.
If I enable “Embedded Metadata” and “Metadata Fetching”, all movies are detected correctly as movies, but the metadata is inconsistent. In some cases, Infuse will ignore the embedded stuff and prioritize external data. This mostly happens to movies with the same title – Infuse will stick with the first hit from TMDb (I guess) and completely ignore my data. Sometimes it gets the wrong year. In all cases, the dashboard will show my embedded covers, but when I tap a movie, it will display a downloaded cover.
All I want is a way to browse my iTunes library as-is. Is that even possible? Speaking of which, can Infuse support that? I mean directly accessing iTunes without resorting to SMB. I don’t believe I’m the only user managing a library with iTunes…
I don’t think so – that’s probably support for loading files of TV episodes as they are organized by iTunes, not accessing the iTunes library directly, which is what I’d love to have.
Unfortunately, Infuse is not able to connect to iTunes directly to access your media. The connection will need to be done over SMB, or one of the other options.
In order to use Infuse’s library features, you will need to keep the Metadata Fetching option enabled. This can be used with the Embedded Metadata option, and Infuse will only fetch online info to fill in any missing gaps. However, fetching embedded metadata can be pretty slow, so we almost always recommend keeping this off unless you have a specific need.
If you find Infuse has matched a few of your titles incorrectly, you can use the Edit option to search for the correct title. A bit more info on doing this can be found here.
I don’t really need to fetch any metadata. But that’s the main issue: whenever I disable fetching metadata, every movie I have is detected as “Other”. Why is that happening? I’d have to review and match all ~600 movies manually! Doesn’t make much sense.
Is this a bug or by design? You can see the metadata from one my movies in the attached screenshot (using Subler), which was detected as “Other”. It would seem this always happens whenever local metadata is used. Can’t you decide the type of media using that “Media Kind” property?
