I’m using Infuse as well, and it’s pretty amazing. The main thing that Infuse does differently from all the others is that it always does Direct Play (in Plex parlance) so you don’t need anything powerful or power hungry to be hosting the video.

Most devices that will play video these days are powerful enough to do the decoding themselves and have the bandwidth available.

I use Jellyfin and it defaults to direct play unless you need transcoding (e.g: the client device doesn't support the chosen format, Firefox with h265 for example, due to licensing) and it will just remux if the container is the only issue. The desktop client just uses mpv so it supports basically everything directly.

> Most devices that will play video these days are powerful enough to do the decoding themselves and have the bandwidth available.

IME this varies a lot between devices. Google TV dongles for example, even the 4K versions, are built with extremely weak SoCs (as in early 2010s phone weak) and lean hard on hardware acceleration. If you want to play back a format that isn’t hardware accelerated on one of these, you’ll have to rely on media server transcoding.

> does differently from all the others

You can tell Emby and Jellyfin to direct play. Pretty sure Plex has that option, but I've not used it in a few years so could be that changed.

In my memory of Plex on my Apple TV device it was off by default and hidden in an advanced menu or something. Not impossible by any means, just annoying.

Yes but Infuse over your whatever VPN back to your NAS/source is the issue. That's where transcoding at source shines. Infuse is great for LAN though.

Infuse offloads transcoding to the client device, so you can use a low powered NAS with an appleTV for example.

It can also direct play a lot of formats too though, because Apple TV boxes since the 2017 4K model have enough muscle for problem free software decoding.

and this is both nice and horrible.

Most audio streams are 'direct stream' when you use plex/jf/emby as backend, but your receiver/soundbar only gets the PCM stream, without any object data (yes, you loose atmos, not that it is a lot of loss when using a soundbar, but if you have atmos speakers in your ceiling you want that data)

in an ideal world, the appletv will simply passthrough the audio upstream, so you receiver can do what it does best.