Combine Movie Folders?

have a few questions that i hope someone can help me with:

  1. i have two drives on my network containing movie files within genre named folders, the folder names and structure are identical for each drive, i.e. each drive has an “action” folder, each drive has a “sci fi” folder, etc… so how do i get infuse to combine two folders with the same name? when i tried adding the “action” folders to infuse it created two separate folders for “action”.

  2. is there a way to hide the genre bar on infuse’s home page?

  3. having a tough time understanding the difference between infuse standalone, infuse with plex, and plex without infuse in terms of video / audio playback quality… is one option clearly better than the others?

thanks in advance for your help!

Welcome to the forum!

First, Infuse doesn’t have a combine folders option. What you may want to do is try out Infuse as it was designed and let it do all the heavy lifting and see if that fits your needs. It really is a great program without Plex.

First, under Settings > Library > make sure “Show Library” is checked. Then below that, make sure all of the folders in the shares that have the files you want sorted are checked.

After that, let Infuse complete a metadata scan and then look at “Library” under the favorites on the home screen. Select Library > Movies > By Genre

That will sort all of your movies by genre. It may not be exactly the same as what you have sorted personally but it follows the listed genres in themoviedb where it gets all of the metadata from.

As to hiding the “Genre” list on the home page, go to the Library favorite, select “Movies” then long press on “By Genre” and select Remove List.

I personally don’t use (or need or want to use) Plex but I believe that the majority of folks using Infuse with Plex prefer the quality of the Infuse player over Plex.

thank you very much for your response, greatly appreciated!

i’ve had a chance to spend some more time with infuse and so far so good (i purchased the yearly pro at the start), but i’m still trying to determine whether or not there is any benefit to using plex (which i already have set up and have used for years) as the backend vs just using infuse as a standalone player / media center? if i choose to use plex is plex’s movie player (mpv) used instead of infuses’s? will plex attempt to transcode? is there any difference in picture / audio quality between the two setups?

btw, it would be great iif users had the ability to change some of the home page category icons (genre for example) in the same manner they’re able to change favorite icons (add your own artwork)… seems that the only there is for category icons is refreshing colors?

thanks again!

Just long press on the one (Genre for example) and you’ll get the options one of which is “Select Artwork”, when you select that you’ll be presented with a list of share to browse to select the graphic you want for “Genres”.

Infuse uses its own rendering engine no matter what is used as the backend. There is no transcoding done and everything played the same as if using SMB.

I use plex as my back end for a few reasons:

  1. I have a Zidoo media player which I use when I I want atmos audio. It runs android and I use the plex kodi plugin so I can share a common library regardless of platform.
  2. Remote access. I’m lazy and plex has a great method for remote access.
  3. Speed. I find there is less network overhead with plex streams which is great when watching things wirelessly on the outside patio as available bandwidth is reduced out there.
  4. If the movie scraper matches the wrong movie I find it easier to edit the matches from a laptop in the plex interface than using the Apple remote app on my phone or the Apple TV remote.
  5. If James gets hit by a bus and I have to move to a different app I don’t have to redo my whole library.

thanks very much gang, your responses have been tremendously helpful, and after some more forum support reading i came across this very helpful thread as well:

a quick question tho regarding plex integration, which i will almost certainly use thanks to @JarvisMeier reply, in shares what’s the difference between selecting “connect to plex” and selecting the networked plex server that shows under “available shares”? thanks again!

hoping for help with a few of questions:

1 - when on the apple tv home page, is there a way to see random movie posters that are in the infuse library when focusing on the infuse icon, as opposed to seeing the huge infuse log, i.e. have the infuse icon behave like the netflix icon when focusing?

2 - within infuse, is there a way to create a favorites folder and then mark individual movie files to show in this folder?

3 - in shares what’s the difference between selecting “connect to plex” and selecting the networked plex server that shows under “available shares”?

4 - is it possible to boot directly into infuse, i.e. bypass atv’s home screen?

thank you very much!

  1. If you use up next (watching and recently added) this will show up on the home page
  2. playlist support is coming and potentially that will work for you
  3. I don’t use plex, sorry
  4. With ios13/tvos13 you will be able to create a shortcut that turns on the apple tv and opens infuse app without needed to see anything else all with a siri shortcut.

thanks, very helpful… i watched a couple of tvos13 demos and i’m not particularly thrilled with the gui, does apple tv allow users to rollback to to earlier builds if you’re not happy with the latest? also, from what i read everything seems to be cosmetic with some added features, is there anything new performance / support wise, such as atmos? thanks!

Apple TV did not add any performance changes with version 13, unfortunately. Most things the same as 12. Once you update you won’t be able to roll back to older version of tvOS, I don’t think.

One of the biggest features in OS13 is the ability for Infuse to take advantage of background file indexing and downloads. I’m seeing some pretty impressive decreases in start up time with it doing the indexing in the background instead of waiting for Infuse to start up. There are also some under the hood changes that speed general browsing up quite a bit.