Turn your Apple TV into the ultimate media player with Infuse
With video-on-demand services such as Netflix, Stan and Presto and all the major free-to-air networks now offering a catch-up TV service, it has never been easier to view the latest blockbuster movie or binge watch your favourite TV show.
However, Australian internet service providers and telcos still impose highly prohibitive data caps on their users, which can make regular viewing of streaming services an expensive proposition, especially while on the go. Then there are times where network access simply isn’t available, such as when on a long-haul flight or while holidaying overseas.
That’s when rolling your own content can be very handy. Out of the box your shiny new Apple TV, iPhone or iPad is incapable of playing your personal content library that you might have stored on a home media server or transferred across to the device manually.
The App Store has literally hundreds of apps that all claim to breathe new life into the content you already own, but not all apps are created equal.
Some are either poorly designed, and performance and file format support can vary wildly from app to app. Apps like PLEX can be great, but the fact that it requires a secondary PC to offload transcoding duties makes it an inconvenient option.
Infuse
Infuse by FireCore offers the most complete video and audio codec support that, in our testing, played almost everything we threw at it, including silky smooth playback of videos with resolutions up to 4K. The app is also one of the few iOS apps to include fully certified support for Dolby Digital Plus, DTS and DTS-HD lossless audio so you can enjoy full surround sound through your home theatre system.
I say almost because Apple is yet to enable hardware decoding for the highly efficient but more demanding H.265/HEVC video standard on its devices. This means that content encoded in this format will have sluggish playback as Infuse is forced to use software-based decoding. Hopefully, Apple rectifies this in a future update. The app also won’t play ISO files, but the developers told me this is something that they are hoping to add in the future.
Infuse is easy to set up — simply point the app to where your videos are stored and it will get to work cataloguing the content, complete with beautiful cover art and movie details. It gives your content a Netflix level sheen that makes browsing your movie and TV show library an enjoyable experience.
Once set up, you won’t have to ever worry about incompatible video formats, file conversion and even subtitles. Swiping down on the Apple TV remote while playing a film or TV show will give you the option to retrieve subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org. You can even adjust the subtitle typeface, size and colour.
Infuse’s powerful decoder puts the Apple TV’s fast A8 processor to work, rendering any incompatible video format natively on the Apple TV, which tremendously simplifies the whole process.
Another nice touch is that the app will keep tabs on your watch history across multiple devices, so you can start watching a movie on your iPad and then pick up where you left off on your Apple TV.
As mentioned, the app streams media from wherever you may happen to have it stored, be it a Mac, PC, NAS, WiFi drives or from server apps such as PLEX. What’s more, Infuse offers a number of ways to transfer your movies to your iPad or iPhone that, thankfully, bypass iTunes completely. You can even transfer content from cloud services such as Dropbox or play back files from external storage accessories like Mophie’s Space Pack.
If you don’t own an Apple TV, then Infuse can also beam the content from your iPhone or iPad to your television via Google’s Chromecast stick.
VLC is the go-to media player for Android
Infuse is only available on Apple devices and there’s nothing really comparable on Android that offers the same level of polish. Popular apps like KODI and MX Player allow you to access content stored on your local network, but the former lacks a touchscreen-friendly UI while the latter suffers from playback stutters on some video formats.
Thankfully, there’s the open-source VLC media player, which is not only completely free but also happens to be the most powerful media player going around. It’s essentially the baby brother to the VLC that we have been using on the desktop for years.
It’s rendering engine is capable of playing back the most number of video formats including 4K resolution files encoded in the demanding HEVC file format and ISO files. We stress-tested VLC with a 4K resolution file of TimeScapes encoded at an extremely taxing 60Mbps bit rate and the app played it back with no problems on our Samsung Galaxy S7 test device.
The main problem with VLC is that it lacks the ability to access content stored on network devices so you will need to use a file manager app like ES File Explorer in conjunction with VLC if you wish to play files stored on your home media server.
It also lacks the slick UI of Infuse or PLEX but if you just want an app that will play anything you throw at it, then VLC is your best bet for Android.
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With video-on-demand services such as Netflix, Stan and Presto and all the major free-to-air networks now offering a catch-up TV service, it has never been easier to view the latest blockbuster movie or binge watch your favourite TV show.
However, Australian internet service providers and telcos still impose highly prohibitive data caps on their users, which can make regular viewing of streaming services an expensive proposition, especially while on the go. Then there are times where network access simply isn’t available, such as when on a long-haul flight or while holidaying overseas.
That’s when rolling your own content can be very handy. Out of the box your shiny new Apple TV, iPhone or iPad is incapable of playing your personal content library that you might have stored on a home media server or transferred across to the device manually.
The App Store has literally hundreds of apps that all claim to breathe new life into the content you already own, but not all apps are created equal.
Some are either poorly designed, and performance and file format support can vary wildly from app to app. Apps like PLEX can be great, but the fact that it requires a secondary PC to offload transcoding duties makes it an inconvenient option.
Infuse
Infuse by FireCore offers the most complete video and audio codec support that, in our testing, played almost everything we threw at it, including silky smooth playback of videos with resolutions up to 4K. The app is also one of the few iOS apps to include fully certified support for Dolby Digital Plus, DTS and DTS-HD lossless audio so you can enjoy full surround sound through your home theatre system.
I say almost because Apple is yet to enable hardware decoding for the highly efficient but more demanding H.265/HEVC video standard on its devices. This means that content encoded in this format will have sluggish playback as Infuse is forced to use software-based decoding. Hopefully, Apple rectifies this in a future update. The app also won’t play ISO files, but the developers told me this is something that they are hoping to add in the future.
Infuse is easy to set up — simply point the app to where your videos are stored and it will get to work cataloguing the content, complete with beautiful cover art and movie details. It gives your content a Netflix level sheen that makes browsing your movie and TV show library an enjoyable experience.
Once set up, you won’t have to ever worry about incompatible video formats, file conversion and even subtitles. Swiping down on the Apple TV remote while playing a film or TV show will give you the option to retrieve subtitles from OpenSubtitles.org. You can even adjust the subtitle typeface, size and colour.
Infuse’s powerful decoder puts the Apple TV’s fast A8 processor to work, rendering any incompatible video format natively on the Apple TV, which tremendously simplifies the whole process.
Another nice touch is that the app will keep tabs on your watch history across multiple devices, so you can start watching a movie on your iPad and then pick up where you left off on your Apple TV.
As mentioned, the app streams media from wherever you may happen to have it stored, be it a Mac, PC, NAS, WiFi drives or from server apps such as PLEX. What’s more, Infuse offers a number of ways to transfer your movies to your iPad or iPhone that, thankfully, bypass iTunes completely. You can even transfer content from cloud services such as Dropbox or play back files from external storage accessories like Mophie’s Space Pack.
If you don’t own an Apple TV, then Infuse can also beam the content from your iPhone or iPad to your television via Google’s Chromecast stick.
VLC is the go-to media player for Android
Infuse is only available on Apple devices and there’s nothing really comparable on Android that offers the same level of polish. Popular apps like KODI and MX Player allow you to access content stored on your local network, but the former lacks a touchscreen-friendly UI while the latter suffers from playback stutters on some video formats.
Thankfully, there’s the open-source VLC media player, which is not only completely free but also happens to be the most powerful media player going around. It’s essentially the baby brother to the VLC that we have been using on the desktop for years.
It’s rendering engine is capable of playing back the most number of video formats including 4K resolution files encoded in the demanding HEVC file format and ISO files. We stress-tested VLC with a 4K resolution file of TimeScapes encoded at an extremely taxing 60Mbps bit rate and the app played it back with no problems on our Samsung Galaxy S7 test device.
The main problem with VLC is that it lacks the ability to access content stored on network devices so you will need to use a file manager app like ES File Explorer in conjunction with VLC if you wish to play files stored on your home media server.
It also lacks the slick UI of Infuse or PLEX but if you just want an app that will play anything you throw at it, then VLC is your best bet for Android.
More
Play 3D Blu-ray on VR via Oculus Cinema?
How to enable stream Blu-ray movies on Raspberry Pi 2 rasplex via Plex?
2016 Easter Coupon: Lowest Price for DVD Ripper/Copier Software
How to rip and store DVD on Plex Media Sever for free streaming
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