Infuse vs VLC media player

Infuse is a video player for Apple devices, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac, and Vision. It plays a wide range of video and audio formats, supports network playback, hardware acceleration, and 4K playback. It can connect to Mac, PC, and NAS devices, cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box, and media servers including Emby, Jellyfin, and Plex. The app can retrieve metadata, artwork, cast information, ratings, and trailers, while iCloud can sync library settings, metadata, and server connections between devices. Users can add subtitles, including one-tap downloads from OpenSubtitles. Compatible hardware supports Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, HDR10, HDR10+, and HLG. Parental controls can restrict access by rating or folder. Infuse is free to download. Pro adds features including additional formats, high-resolution Dolby and DTS-HD audio, AirPlay and Google Cast, advanced library synchronization, and cloud streaming. Pro costs $1.99 a month or $16.99 a year; a lifetime option costs $99.99, paid once. A free 7-day trial is listed for monthly and lifetime plans.

VLC media player is a free media player for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android. It plays multimedia files, DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs and streams, with sources including files, discs, webcams and connected devices. Supported formats include MPEG-1/2, MPEG-4, H.264, DivX, XviD, WMV, MKV, MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM, MP3, AAC and FLAC. It supports subtitles, network playback, hardware acceleration and 4K playback, and most codecs work without a separate codec pack. VLC also supports skins, extensions and skin creation through VLC Skin Editor. Additional downloads are listed for Apple TV, Windows variants, several GNU/Linux distributions and systems including Chrome OS, FreeBSD and Solaris. VideoLAN is a non-profit project, and its source code can be obtained directly. The free plan states that VLC has no spyware, ads or user tracking; no other free-tier limits are listed.