Infuse 5.3 for iOS and tvOS comes with a completely overhauled high-performance playback core that’s now now faster and better than ever before.
Other new features are available in Infuse 5.3 as well.
The app now accepts your Blu-ray disc images and folders and lets you restrict access to videos and settings with built-in parental controls. The release also packs support for ISO 9960 (Joliet) disc images, country-specific age ratings for movies and much more.
For starters, Infuse brings optimized playback performance:
The new, revamped Infuse playback core is now faster and better than ever before. We started at the very foundation, and worked our way through the entire playback pipeline, improving and optimizing almost everything along the way to deliver exceptional performance for nearly every video type.
Among other changes to the playback core, Infuse now takes advantage of the VideoToolbox that became available on Apple TV with tvOS 10.2. On iOS, the VideoToolbox has been available since iOS 8.
“The new core gives us an excellent foundation for HEVC (h.265) but proper HEVC support wasn’t fully baked in time for Infuse 5.3,” developers noted. Hardware-assisted HEVC decoding is unsupported in tvOS so the device’s A8 processor may have to do the heavy lifting in a future update to the app.
Parental controls in Infuse on iOS and Apple TV (accessed via the app’s settings interface) make it easy to limit what type of videos your little ones (and other users) can access, Other parental controls include setting PIN code restrictions for movie and TV show age ratings and protecting the app with Touch ID (you can use passcode protection on Infuse for Apple TV).
Lastly, Infuse now supports Blu-ray disc images (ISO) and folders (BDMV) which are now recognized and added to your Library automatically so all you have to do is tap to play your Blu-ray movies.
A number of improvements for the Up Next list are included in Infuse 5.3, too. Rather than continue talking about other changes, here’s everything new, improved and fixed in Infuse 5.3:
New:
- New, ultra-high-performance playback core
- Parental Controls for restricting access to videos and settings
- Support for Blu-ray disc images (ISO) and folders (BDMV)
- Support for ISO 9960 (Joliet) disc images
- Country-specific age ratings for movies
- Added search link to 3D Touch menu
- Turkish (ISO 8859-9/Latin-5) subtitle encoding
- Grace period for renewing or expiring subscriptions
- Changed quick-rewind button to 10s instead of 30s
Improved:
- Improved metadata fetching for recently added TV shows
- Improved loading times when accessing cloud shares (Dropbox, Google Drive, One Drive)
- Improved detection of DVD folders
- Improved Google Drive login workflow
- Improved library scanning to avoid unnecessary rescans
- Other minor improvements
Fixed:
- Resolved playback issues affecting some interlaced VC-1 videos
- Resolved issues with downloading ISO files
- Resolved AirPlay related issues
- Resolved rare orientation issue
- Resolved rare crash when scanning/indexing videos
- Other minor fixes
Developers are considering bringing Infuse to macOS, which would be pretty great considering Mac users are limited to a handful of third-party options regarding media players. Besides, Infuse has probably the best transcoding and rendering engine in the industry and I can’t wait to have that experience on my Mac.
Check out my review of Infuse 5.
I use Infuse on my Apple TV on a daily basis in conjunction with my 3TB Time Capsule.
Of course, you can connect Infuse to other wireless storage devices and network shares within the app. In a nutshell, the app transcodes most foreign file types like DivX, AVI, MKV and others on the fly and has built-in subtitle support.
You just pick a video file residing on your connected network share, select one of the automatically downloaded subtitles and Infuse begins stream the video, with subtitles, as if you’re streaming a movie from iTunes.
While it doesn’t yet support SUB or IDX subtitle formats, I’m hearing subtitles is going to be a major focus area for Infuse 5.4. For those wondering, Infuse works great with NAS devices like Synology accessories [review].
Infuse 5 for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV is a free download from App Store.
Advanced features are available as a $6.49 per year subscription through the In-App Purchase mechanism. Don’t worry, a free one-month trial of Infuse Pro is available within the app. If you’re not fond of renting apps, you can buy Infuse for iOS and tvOS outright for $12.99.