Infuse adds enhanced Dolby Vision (profile 8) support, trailers

The best media player app for Apple TV (tvOS) has been updated to version 7.5 with enhanced Dolby Vision support, trailers, smart groups, and video playback improvements.

Dolby Vision has many parts. For example, Dolby Vision profile 5 is used for video streaming over the internet from Netflix and other services while profile 7 is used exclusively on UHD Blu-ray discs (and not fully supported on any streaming players).

Dolby Vision profile 8 has additional sub-profiles that are backwards compatible: Profile 8.1 is backwards compatible with HDR10, profile 8.2 with SDR, and profile 8.4 with HLG (what iPhone 12 or newer shoots Dolby Vision videos in).

It is kind of a mess and various media player apps are trying to get on top of the situation. Infuse, which in our opinion is the best app for local media playback on Apple TV 4K, has added enhanced support for profile 8. However, some videos will still fall back on HDR10, the company said.

- "Dolby Vision comes in many different flavors, and today we’re adding expanded support for Dolby Vision Profile 8," announced Infuse. "By default, the best video playback option will automatically be selected based on the video file and the device you are using, and you can change how this works by adjusting the Extended Dolby Vision option found in Infuse > Settings > Playback."

These settings are available:

Extended Dolby Vision (Applies to DoVi Profile 8 only)
Auto (prefer compatibility) - Convert P8 to P5 (when possible), and attempt to play other P8 as P8 via the system player (output will usually switch to DoVi)
Limited (prefer accuracy) - Convert P8 to P5 (when possible), and play other P8 as HDR (output will switch to either DoVi or HDR depending on the video)
Off - Ignore all DoVi details and play P8 as HDR (output will always switch to HDR)


 Infuse 7.5 now adds trailers to your indexed movies. Photo: Infuse

Trailers, smart groups
Infuse 7.5 also adds support for movie trailers from a catalogue of over 250.000. A new trailer button will automatically show up on indexed movies.

Trailer functionality is available to all Pro subscribers, and you can long-press the trailer button in Infuse for additional trailers.


 Smart Groups lets you group different version of the same movie. Photo: Infuse

Another new feature is 'Smart Groups' to let you group different versions of the same movie. For example, different resolutions (1080p, 4K) or different releases (Director’s Cut, Theatrical Cut).

Lastly, Infuse said that it has "revamped a hefty chunk of the playback internals" to improve video playback performance across the board including for wonky video files with encoding issues.

The app update is available now from Apple TV's app store.

Infuse 7.5 (tvOS) – changelog
NEW
- Play video trailers for movies and TV shows
- Group multiple copies of a movie together using ‘Smart Groups’
- Recognize tags in filenames for cuts/parts
- Choose metadata language when searching for movie/show titles

IMPROVED
- Enhanced support for Dolby Vision (Profile 8) videos
- Improved library search times
- Improved handing of HDR/DoVi videos with invalid timestamps
- Improved handling of yuv444p10le videos
- Improved playback of some HEVC RExt videos
- Many other internal player improvements

FIXED
- Fixed cast and crew indexing
- Fixed sorting of the ‘By Rating’ category on Home Screen
- Fixed fetching of DoVi tags from Plex
- Fixed indexing status wrapping on Library screen
- Fixes for playing RLE videos
- Fixed crashes related to UPnP/DLNA when discovering shares
- Fixed missing VoiceOver tags
- Fixes for some DVD (VobSub) subtitles
- Fixed continuous playback setting for Collections
- Fixed appearance of playback cache bar
- Fixed crashes during metadata fetching
- Other minor fixes and improvements
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