FireCore‘s versatile iPhone and iPad media player, Infuse, recently received a massive version 2.0 update sporting iOS 7-friendly interface while going free for everyone, with a couple advanced features locked behind a Pro in-app purchase. In today’s free update, Infuse 2.1 unlocks more video formats for free users while adding variable speed scrubbing option, support for an additional subtitle format, better translations and the usual assortment of bug fixes and performance improvements…
Free users can now play a wider variety of video formats and take advantage of subtitles in .smi format. The HTML-formated SAMI subtitle file type was developed in 1998 as a Microsoft accessibility initiative and is used nowadays to provide closed caption support for multimedia formats.
Content artwork as well as Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian and Spanish translations have been improved in this Infuse release. Another handy new feature is the variable speed scrubbing option which works just like the iOS system media player.
This lets you fast-forward or rewind your movie with precise control, simply by holding the playback position dot and dragging your finger down for finer control (or up to increase the scrubbing speed).
Like before, advanced features like network streaming, AirPlay, Dolby Digital mobile surround sound, support for even more file types and other perks are available as a one-time in-app purchase.
As far as the sound goes, Infuse supports AAC, AC3, FLAC, MP3 and OGG audio tracks and sports licensed Dolby Digital Plus mobile surround sound support. Though DTS isn’t supported, that feature is being prioritized so it’s a matter of when, not if.
The application will happily crunch 3GP, AVI, ASF, DVR-MS, FLV, M4V, MKV, MOV, MP4, OGM, OGV, WebM, WMV and WTV video formats and render DVB, DVDsub, PGS, SSA/ASS, SRT, SUB, Timed Text, VobSub, XSUB and MSI subtitle formats, with perhaps the most robust implementation of AirPlay subtitle streaming I’ve seen yet.
The app takes media files via the iTunes File Sharing method or directly, from FTP, WebDAB or network-attached storage. More on streaming from other devices, including Time Capsule, can be found here.
Other features in the works for Infuse 2.2: metadata for shared files, lots of networking improvements, sound boosting, support for Synology NAS along with folder creation and the ability to copy files directly from a NAS (or SMB) to the app and more.
Infuse 2 is available free in the App Store.
Folks who bought Infuse prior to the release of Infuse 2 get all Pro features for free.