Infuse is one of the best media apps you can get on your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. I am using this app for last 3-4 years for all my media needs and it is getting evolved every day with new features.
I currently have many apple devices which usually connect to my NAS drive for all their media needs. My NAS is very basic UPnP/DLNA, SMB drive connects to my NetGear Nighthawk R8000, so it can’t run any server side app.
My basic need is an app, which can run on the client side and allows me to use my SMB server. Infuse does that work perfectly and allows me to play my movies and TV Shows on any device.
What Can Infuse Do For You?
Infuse can be a fully featured video player with streaming support and can connect to many different kinds of sources to get all your videos. It will collect and show you all the information in a single view to provide a single server view. We will check all the features in detail.
Multiple Video-Source Support
Infuse supports many different kinds of video source like SMB, UPnP, DLNA, iTunes, Mac, PC, file download and upload etc. They also have a support for Airdrop, so you can just airdrop your video files over wifi from your Mac.
You can also use any of the cloud services like iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive etc to add files to Infuse. Also, it adds a file transfer support for iTunes, which means you can directly transfer your video to iPhone or iPad while syncing. It can combine all the information from that sources and shows a unified view.
Multi-Format Audio & Video Support
Infuse can almost play all kind of media format including Video_TS, DVDMedia, ISO/IMG, MP4, M4V, Avi etc. It can also support many different audio and subtitle formats.
This means that you don’t need to convert your video’s to play it on your apple devices, it can play them with the help of software decoding.
It supports Airplay and Google Cast support in the app, so you can play them on any compatible TV. Videos which have been synced from iTunes can not use Google Cast but the video uploaded by you or from the server can use that.
Automatic Metadata Matching
Infuse automatically syncs with TheMoviesDB and TheTVDB to get the metadata for your videos. As long as the video file name is in the certain format, it will be able to fetch the details and show it in the app. It can also fetch subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org to provide subtitles dynamically and allows you to control font, timing, size etc for those.
Most of the standard file names are supported like individual name, names separated by underscore or dash. I have used it with over 1500 tv episodes and it was able to match them correctly as it gets season and episode number from them. You can also arrange your TV shows in folders and it still should be able to pick them.
I have faced issue with Movies as sometimes it can match them with wrong movies. It happens mostly when you have same name movies which have released in different years. You can add release year in the name of the file to force matching with a specific release and it should take care of the issue.
It also provides support for custom artwork for your movies and tv episodes. You can add your images to the server with a specific format and it will use those rather than downloading it from online. You can find more details about the metadata matching in this support article.
Library View in Infuse
This is one of my favorite things about this app, it arranges all the media information in a nicely laid out Library view. Earlier this library view was only available for Apple TV but with the latest update, it has come to iPhone and iPad also.
Infuse will scan all your shared sources and iTunes upload to create a Library view. It provides smart filters to access those videos like Genre, recently played, recently added, unwatched etc. It also creates a collection view for your movie series, which will list the complete series in order. If you collect many movie series, you will enjoy this view.
iCloud & Trakt Integration
Infuse provides Trakt integration and automatically marks your played video. It provides support for scrobbling and sync your watched history, playback position, ratings & comments.
It also uses iCloud to sync certain things for the app, which will provide more unified viewing experience across devices.
- Saved networks shares (addresses, username, password)
- Saved Favorites (folders and Library items)
- Up Next list (in-progress and recently added items)
- Manual metadata corrections (corrections for mismatched titles)
- File specific playback settings (selected audio/subtitle track, zoom setting, etc…)
- General settings (iOS device backups only)
Also Read: 10 Cool Augmented Reality (AR) Apps to use on iPhone 8 / X
Gesture Control
On iOS app it supports gesture controls while playback to control the things like playback position, volume, fast forward and rewind etc. These gesture controls are only available on iPhone and iOS, for Apple TV basic video control works fine.
Parental Control
With the latest update, it has also added parental controls in the app. If you give any iOS device to your little one, you can use those settings to restrict the videos it can play.
You can lock the app with the passcode and Touch ID to protect it from unauthorized use. It also allows to setup Movie and TV Shows rating which can be played by the app.
HEVC Support For iOS 11
iOS 11 is supposed to add many changes to image and video format with HEIF/HEVC for formats. It should save a lot of space on your iOS device.
Infuse is already got an update to provide the support for the new format. So you can use the new format as soon as iOS 11 releases.
Pricing
Infuse comes in two different pricing models, you can get a yearly subscription with all the updates or buy it with a one time cost with the support of all the minor release.
If you get it using one-time cost, you will not receive any major update and you might have to but it again. There is no fixed schedule for Major updates and I am not sure how frequently you need to purchase it again but if you are worried about that, you can buy a yearly subscription.
If you opt for one time purchase, you don’t need to upgrade to a major release until it has something which you really want. Your release will still work and you can keep using it. Infuse Pro can be shared by Family sharing with up to 6 members.
Conclusion
Infuse takes care of most of the basic needs of a fully functional video player. It also allows you to stream your content to multiple devices from a single source and help in setting up the media server with minimal cost.
The UI is very polished and provides a very good experience on iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. Try the Infuse app if you are looking for a good video player with streaming capabilities on your Apple devices.
Hope this will help you decide on Infuse App if you have any question let me know in comments below.
