Version 7 (macOS) first impressions

General
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I’m a (paying) Infuse user, primarily using it with a Jellyfin server set-up:

  • Is this a Catalyst app and not a proper Mac app? This has all sorts of UI consequences, to name just one example is that page up/down buttons don’t work. (I know that bringing out the Mac version is more than just clicking a button in Xcode, but still.)

  • Why does it want to connect to files.firecore.com?

  • Why does it want to connect to various ntp servers?

  • When I drill down to a movie’s “home page” (let’s say from the home tab in the sidebar), then click on something else in the sidebar and then go back by clicking on the home tab, I’m back to the main screen.

  • While playing various types of video files, CPU usage is quite high… are you perhaps not using any hardware accelerated decoding?

  • On a movie’s “home page”, it’s promising to see lists of the movie’s actors, director etc. (why not composers?) but the names are not clickable. Quite the omission, as it would be helpful to see what other movies I have with a particular actor etc.

(Oh and by the way, I see that on iOS, a movie’s home page shows what is known as “fanart” but crops it to a square, why not show the full 16:9 image?)

I could go on and this would result in a quite negative review of Infuse, unfortunately. The basic (and of course most important) thing that Infuse does do well is decode a range of video and audio codecs, as far as my eyes and ears can tell (I didn’t measure things properly. Yet.) but for an app that is 8 years in development as I’ve read somewhere you guys surely can do better? Don’t get me wrong and certainly don’t take it personally, but having perused this forum for a little while, it seems a lot of problems and feature requests don’t get addressed, or get postponed, or not followed up at all, including my own little issue in the past. Why is this? There’s 8 people working for fireCore (this was mentioned by James somewhere). Are they busy with other projects or consulting? Fine in itself of course, and not to come over as insulting, but then Infuse seems more like a side project?

Now, I find this a real pity, because Infuse could be so much better and really be the best client out there (I’m talking being a server client here). I would really like to see that happen. But for now, it is easier for me to forego Infuse as a client application than to get rid of my server set-up (I think we all agree on having a client-server solution is the superior way for a lot of people…)

Tonight I will check the tvOS version, hope it does a little better.

Sorry for the, uhm, rant.

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OK, so I tried the new version on tvOS. It’s kind of OK. Mostly cosmetic and UI changes, no real new functionality added AFAIK. Rushed out the door it seems (to keep subscribers happy?), for instance you can click on actor buttons, but it doesn’t do anything, as a few people already noticed. I hope that kind of thing will be implemented soon and works with my server set-up. I understand the issues a lot of people have (I share some of them) but for now, it works OK for me. For now. I have a list of feature enhancements and requests that I might post every now and then, but who knows what they will do with it. The company doesn’t seem to be very reactive to that.

I deleted Infuse from my phone, because I’m not going to watch movies on it. I also deleted the Mac version (see above post, it was a test machine anyway) because on the desktop I use the very capable Jellyfin Media Player, thank you very much. (Also no transcoding needed nowadays, like Infuse.)

We’ll see what happens on the tvOS front.