This is a bit of a brain dump on some unrealized potential for where I think Infuse could go.
Before I get into that, I should share some background for the perspective driving my suggestions:
100% of my titles come from discs that I purchase. I simply like the convenience of Netflix, Disney+, etc., but I’m also a cord cutter that strongly prefers content that I choose/curate vs. content managed by some service that I subscribe to. What’s interesting when you’re using Infuse for this purpose is that you can accumulate a lot of fun/interesting content in the extras on movie discs: deleted scenes, trailers, featurettes, etc., and even animated menus with video and audio.
I’m also a member of a multi-lingual household, and we watch movies in English and French in our home.
With this being my background, here are some challenges I have with Infuse that I’ve been thinking about, along with some proposed solutions:
- Infuse doesn’t handle forced subtitle tracks properly. Forced subtitle tracks have an associated language, and should only be forced if the following two conditions are true:
a) You don’t already have a subtitle track selected.
b) A subtitle track matching the language of the audio track exists with the forced flag set on that track.
Instead, today, Infuse simply looks for a forced track and selects the first one it finds, even if it doesn’t match the language of the selected audio track. This should be considered a bug.
- Infuse does not provide much value when it comes to additional content (extras, menus, etc.).
Wouldn’t it be interesting if you could include some metadata in text files adjacent to your movie files that allowed you to:
a) Configure specific playback options for a movie or a show, such as selecting the video/audio/subtitle track you want from a single button like an edition button, or playing one or more extras.
b) Define pause options, so that when you are watching a movie as a family and you pause for a bio/snack break, maybe you make some extras available like trailers, or deleted scenes, or other extras that you have added to your collection, allowing family members that were watching the movie to stay engaged in the movie experience and see extras that are available instead of getting lost in cellphones/tablets during a break, with an easy way to return to the movie you were watching when you finish watching any extra that you play.
c) Play a menu mkv file that represents the disc menu with an overlay menu on top that you can define in the metadata, providing access to extras that are available on the disk, and add a menu option as described in (a), above, so that you can either go into a menu or jump straight into one of several movie experiences that are defined and available.
That describes the kind of experience that I would like to build. When you own a large collection of movies and have access to all of the extras that are available, it would be quite enjoyable (for me, at least) to digitize it all and build a rich experience that can be consumed by family members through Infuse on TVs or mobile devices, including proper management of multiple languages and access to extras that we have available to us in our movie/show libraries.
Regardless of where this goes, thank you for providing this great product. We’re all really enjoying the experience that it provides us, and with only two service subscriptions left, I can tell that we’ll be able to get that down to none in the not too distant future (or maybe one, that we rotate, just to check out some new content that is available from time to time to see if we want to add it to our collection).
