Alternative to iOS Videos App?

[jdag]

Is there an alternative app to the built-in Videos app that would leverage Home Sharing? The reasons I ask...

1) The Videos app is terribly slow to display artwork and easily navigate with a large library.
2) There is no search.
3) My library does not properly display and I have to log out of Home Sharing, then back in, to get my Videos app to display properly (I've read this elsewhere, it is not just me)

I know there are other methods of accessing the shared drive, such as via FileBroweser, but that's not really a media app per se (no artwork, metadata, etc.). I can also set up Plex and use the Plex app, but that would not maintain the watched/unwatched status of my library.

Thanks in advance.

John

 

[Menneisyys2]

Is there an alternative app to the built-in Videos app that would leverage Home Sharing? The reasons I ask...

1) The Videos app is terribly slow to display artwork and easily navigate with a large library.
2) There is no search.
3) My library does not properly display and I have to log out of Home Sharing, then back in, to get my Videos app to display properly (I've read this elsewhere, it is not just me)

I know there are other methods of accessing the shared drive, such as via FileBroweser, but that's not really a media app per se (no artwork, metadata, etc.). I can also set up Plex and use the Plex app, but that would not maintain the watched/unwatched status of my library.

Thanks in advance.

John

1, No other player is compatible with Home Sharing, not even jailbroken ones.

2, there are a lot of players capable of playing back videos over standard protocols like SBM, UPnP, HTTP, FTP etc. but most of them are, generally, plagued with a lot of problems, particularly if you want to play back e.g. MKV (or any kind of non-iOS-native, that is, non-mov/mp4/m4v) files. (See https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1503346/ and https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=16446551 for more info.)

3, unfortunately, none of these players can display artwork (see https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1511080/ for more info).

You could mail the Plex devs to add watched/unwatched status support to their app? They're pretty responsive.

 

[jdag]

Thanks for the quick response...more or less what I expected. I am very familiar with Plex, so may go that route. I used Plex exclusively before deciding to convert all of my library to iTunes compatible format. I just never expected the Video app to be so...blah.