> It only allows you to connect to a server instance via unencrypted http://

Hmm, no, it doesn’t. No idea why you believe that. It works perfectly fine with https url.

I don’t really understand the rest of your comment as indexing and metadata look ups are done by the server and not the client. Plus Swiftfin uses VLC under the hood so it shouldn’t have issue with playback.

Are you using the fairly recent stable version or are you experience on an older development version? Swiftfin has been officially available for only a month.