I’m new to Infuse and also to backing up all of my discs for easy access. I don’t need the transcoding capabilities of Plex and I chose to use infuse to simply play my media on my AppleTV 4K. But I find myself wondering if I should set up some kind of server for my media. Is there some advantage to doing that over allowing Infuse to handle everything. Thanks!
You can take a look at this thread
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I see comments about Plex servers, and was wondering if someone could explain the advantage of a server.
I tried Plex cause I wanted smart menus for my collections. Is the reason Plex can do this is because of their servers. I didn’t try the other servers so I don’t what they offer.
Since infuse doesn’t have a server, does this limit their options?
I moved your post to a thread with similar questions that just started yesterday so it would give you a common thread to discuss. 
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I have found it easier to make changes to my metadata through Plex Also using Plex as the source of my files enable me to use Plex outside of my LAN much easier than setting it up with Infuse alone.
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Thanks! After reading through that thread I think I might try Jellyfin. I’d like more control over my metadata and also the speed of updating is appealing to me.
I’m going to leave this thread open so others can gain info and ask other concerns on the same topic.
I would make one suggestion, before you go to the effort to build an additional server like Plex, Jellyfin, or Emby I’d recommend you try Infuse on it’s own. It truly shines by itself and if you can avoid the hassle of integrating two different software packages it really makes it more enticing.
If you then find you need more control or some of the more advanced features then you can transition to one of the server packages.
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I use Infuse via WebDAV sharing and it works perfectly. The only downside is that the library takes longer to update after a change compared to a Plex or Emby server.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I have been using Infuse for many months now. Overall it’s great, but i have found a few instances where it really wants to label a movie incorrectly and I have to change the metadata manually more than once. One obscure Japanese film called “Inuneko” gets labeled “Cats and Dogs” an unofficial translation of the title, which is weird and bugs me because it’s out of place in my library. Also if using a server allows me to have more control over the organization of my Looney Tunes shorts that would be great.
Overall organization in Infuse is not intuitive. Adding a title with multiple versions to a collection is clunky because context menus don’t work on them and you have to go into the title and manually select each version and add it to the collection. Adding new titles to a collection is clunky on AppleTV because the multi select doesn’t work everywhere. It’s odd that you can’t go to a collection and choose to add titles and get a list of all your media to multi select.
I have folders such as “Jackie Chan” with sub folders of his movies which have sub folders called “extras” that don’t get ignored for some reason (file structure?) and I have to manually add .nomedia files to them.
Anyway, there is a lot of room for user experience improvement with Infuse, but I don’t see a lot of movement on that front. Case in point the support for extra features that has many, many upvotes hasn’t been finished after something like 7 years.
True, but if you look at all the things it did add in the last seven years it is quite extensive. UI overhaul coming in v8. Might be a time to intercept this request
I hope you’re right, but given the lack of interest in responding to the thread about it I doubt it. I’d love to be wrong.
I use Jellyfin, and want the control over metadata and file organization that Jellyfin gives.
Based on my personal experience, media servers like Plex and Emby offer a better syncing feature across devices compared to Infuse itself, especially when you have platforms other than Apple, such as Android OS devices.
Yesterday I was a bit frustrated about collections from my Mac not syncing to my appletv. So I set up Jellyfin. Still messing with it, but so far I really like all the options and the availability of plugins.
After about a week messing around with Jellyfin (the newest version appears to have a bug for people starting from scratch) I find it definitely has its limitations. While I’m super annoyed with the metadata choices on infuse for some shows (Star Wars Rebels, Garfield and Friends, Looney Tunes), that was only partially resolved with Jellyfin. While TVDB offers a proper listing for Garfield, Jellyfin doesn’t seem to be able to use it because the name of that list of episodes is non standard.
Maybe I just didn’t see the right options, but I couldn’t get the Home Screen setup like I have it in Infuse either where I have full playlists right there, or even categories like “Movies”. Jellyfin seems to want to only show me recent additions and my folders. The process of changing metadata could be very slow as well. Maybe this has to do with my older synology, not sure, but after changing something it could take a long time after I clicked “ok” to be able to move on. It doesn’t prepopulate the search field when you “identify” a movie either. Infuse is good at this.
There are a lot more little things, but you get the point. Neither solution does things the way that I want. Jellyfin gives more choices for metadata, but Infuse seems to have better organization from what I can tell.
I looked into the custom metadata options in Infuse and was able to use tinyMediaManager to scrape the metadata I wanted for Garfield and Friends. This was actually one of my bigger issues with the metadata from TMDB because they took 30 minute episodes and chopped them into 3 episodes each in their show list. It’s a bit like taking every episode of SNL and cutting it into individual sketches. I wasn’t about to split up my MKVs to make it work. I’m quite happy with what I have now. I can easily create custom .nfo files for the few titles that really bug me and just use Infuse.
I’ve been a Plex and Infuse user for 6ish years. In the last year I’ve mostly migrated over to Jellyfin (the only thing holding me back is the lack of appleTV app that respects the server bandwidth limitations). Like others have stated, the main purpose of a fully fledged media server is a few points. Synced play status across multiple devices, OS’s, and Users. The ability to have more control over metadata, and I think one of the biggest things is Remote playback. Being able to access your library from anywhere.