I often watch movies on my iPad, but VLC which I have used for years on my Mac is not good on the iPad.
If I exit VLC while playing so,etching and go to another app and return to VLC then always so,e issue comes up like no audio or it starts lagging and I have to manually play the video again from scratch.
So I’ve been looking at Infuse and trying it out. Anyone have any experience with it? They have a pro tier which offers more features. So far so good and it seems like a reliable company, which is to be trusted.
I’ve been using it for quite a while and like it very much. Some may not like the fact that it tries to fetch metadata and create a “Library” with rich visuals. I like it though. Airplay, Dolby Atmos and a few other niceties are behind a cheap subscription.
They have had a subscription model for a long time, and perhaps now it’s only that model. I know it goes partly to paying for patent licenses which is partly why VLC on the iPad hasn’t been great.
FYI, the whole library thing gets a lot nicer and faster if you throw all your media behind a Plex Server. Plex then does a lot of the slow data fetching and makes the Infuse experience much more responsive.
Infuse works well. I use it on my Apple TV to watch training videos I’ve got stored on Dropbox and onedrive. It downloads them straight from the cloud.
It’s a cheap subscription too. I subscribe annually, but if you want to try it out the monthly rate is low.
VLC sucks.
Infuse is incredible but it’s expensive as *@&$. I got greedy and waited for a special from the $70 lifetime which ended up being raised price-wise 4 times to $90 and ended up buying it there
Thanks all for the replies. Sounds like I can go ahead and delete VLC from all my devices and rely on Infuse going forward.
I downloaded Infuse for my Apple TV 4K. Does anyone know if with or without a subscription it’s possible to load a movie into Infuse on my iPad and then have it appear automatically in Infuse on my Apple TV and play it there without casting from my iPad?
I believe you’re talking about some sort of handoff feature and as far as I can tell, that’s not possible with or without a subscription. You’ll need to use the AppleTV to load the movie. Also, without a subscription, you won’t necessarily be able to play all audio/video formats. The subscription is paying for the patent licenses which unlock those features.
You would need to create a server on the iPad so the Apple TV client could find and stream the file. AFAIK that is not possible in the iPadOS architecture.
If you have a desktop, a Raspberry Pi a NAS or any kind of device that can create a local SMB file share, than you can use that shared folder as a source for either your Apple TV and iPad.
I have a MacBook Air which I use occasionally, but most of my films and tv shows are on external hard drives that I plug in when I want to watch something. Are you saying I could load those external hard drives about 1tb of video files to some sort of cloud server that my Mac could access when on and that Infuse could on my apple tv could connect to when my Mac was open?
If you can leave your MacBook Air turned on and with the HDDs attached, you can:
Share the disk to the local network (via SMB) and use your iPad and Apple TV at home (easier, but will only work at home);
Use an app like Jellyfin or Plex to allow for your iPad to connect (even remotely) to your MacBook Air (or any computer for that matter) and stream files stored there;
If you cannot or just don’t want to, you can use your cloud provider of choice (Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive etc. Infuse is compatible with nearly all of them) to store the files and download it on demand to your device via Infuse. Note that some of these services may scan your files for ilegally downloaded media and may enforce their Terms of Service. If your collection is made of family videos, however, you can use their services with no issues whatsoever.
All of my videos live on an external hard drive that’s attached to my iMac. I’ve set the drive up as a share on my network via SMB, pointed Infuse at it, and watch videos on both my iPad and my Apple TV. I don’t have a subscription, and it works just fine.
