The hero image stops showing the previous title's artwork (#21).
What was actually wrong
Reported with two videos: "the selected title changes immediately, but the backdrop/hero image remains on the previous title... the title that is focused and the hero image shown on screen don't match for a moment."
The hero only swapped once the new texture was fully decoded, and until then the old artwork stayed. The code said so in as many words and treated it as a feature: "while the cache does not return a texture, the hero does not change and the screen keeps the art that was already there."
For 200 ms that is right — it stops the hero flickering while you walk along a row. For three seconds it is something else entirely: the focused card is already a different title and the hero still shows the previous one. The screen is asserting something false, and that is worse than showing no artwork at all. The slowness is the cause; the lie is the defect.
There is now a 400 ms ceiling after the focus settles. Past it the swap happens anyway and the hero shows the new title's placeholder — a drawing that already existed for titles with no artwork. The texture request was queued in the same frame, so the real artwork fades in on its own when it arrives. With artwork already cached the swap happens well before the ceiling and it is never reached; it only shows up when the network is involved.
What I did not do, and why
Pre-fetching the neighbouring titles' artwork would fix the cause rather than the symptom. Each hero image is a 1920-wide texture of roughly 8 MB, and this codebase already records that requesting too many of them evicts the posters you are looking at. Trading one defect for another without measuring would be guesswork, and the TV I measure on went off the network before I could. It stays open, with the measurement it needs written down: eviction count and frame rate, before and after, over an identical path of key presses.
I also have not yet measured the three intervals I promised on the issue — focus change to request sent, request to bytes arrived, bytes to texture ready. Those separate "the network is slow" from "the decode queue is behind" from "the request only starts when focus lands", and they need different fixes. This release repairs what the screen claims, not how long it takes.
Installing
Samsung Tizen 5.5+ — NuvioTV-1.0.24-tizen.wgt, unsigned; sign it with your own TV's DUID (steps in the v1.0.7 notes).
LG webOS 4.x — space.nuvio.native.legacy_1.0.24_arm.ipk. Everything from v1.0.23 is included.
Unofficial, and not affiliated with NuvioMedia.