This pre-release represents a major refactoring featuring:
- Zero warnings or errors: Resolved over 1,000 lint warnings—Nova now compiles with no warnings, lint errors, or warnings.
- Multimedia engine robustness: Addressed an extensive review of the avos multimedia engine conducted with the GPT-6 Astra model, that should result in significant stability improvements (but a change can always introduce regressions).
These changes impact many application layouts, especially for Right-to-Left (RTL) locales.
We welcome feedback from users using RTL locales (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian). For RTL locales, Nova should now respect RTL layout mirroring across all UI screens, with the exception of the video player controls to follow industry standards.
Please also check all audio passthrough modes and report any robustness issue with seek, play/pause/resume.
Detailed changelog:
- Fix jcifs-ng smb regression preventing playback
- Improve playback stability: fix lip-sync drift, seek/pause/resume glitches, and audio speed transitions
- Fix audio issues with AC3/TrueHD passthrough, PCM decoding/downmix, and midstream output reconfiguration
- Fix subtitle decoding, timing, and track switching reliability across seeks
- Fix crashes and freezes related to demux read-ahead errors, decoder recovery, and video frame retention
- Fix metadata retriever and thumbnail generation lifecycle/ownership issues
- Replace internal color conversion with FFmpeg swscale for better performance and compatibility
- Upgrade FFmpeg to 9.0.1
- Improve SMB, SFTP, and SSH transfer throughput and stability
- Fix WebDAV compatibility with servers requiring PROPFIND allprop fallback
- Fix HTTP proxy streaming, byte-range handling, and cancellation
- Fix file name handling by stripping query parameters
- Fix preferences screen scrolling and D-pad navigation issues
- Always show internal storage category regardless of connectivity
- Fix layout, RTL, and accessibility issues across the UI (menus, player controls, subtitles, video info)
- Preserve playback across surface, audio-route, and focus changes
- Fix crash when entering Picture-in-Picture mode
- Fix intro/outro fetch and UI updates when toggling play mode
- Fix Leanback details row inflation and color flash on transition