Brings the fork up to date with official NuvioTV 0.8.11 and a couple of fork fixes too. The headline fork work: home-hero trailers now blend into the backdrop, the MDBList library no longer freezes with half its posters blank, and the false "video decoder may not be responding" error is gone. On top of that, all of official 0.8.11

At a glance

• Everything from official 0.8.11-beta is included. Credit to the upstream authors: @skoruppa, @ieno, @kayochiaradia, @halibiram, @ram130, @tapframe, @haveAnIssue, @unsuns06, @blueocean2308 and @danilopagotto82.
• The Back button finally behaves. One press closes the player's OSD instead of two; on the home screen Back walks a browsed row back to its start instead of dumping you at the sidebar, a long press opens the sidebar directly, and Continue Watching remembers where you were.
• Hero trailers fade into the backdrop — matching the official presentation, but kept sharper.
• MDBList library posters no longer freeze half-loaded, and the Library fills in progressively.
• The false "video decoder may not be responding" error is gone — it now clears itself, waits longer for slow-but-healthy starts, and tells the truth when it does appear.
• A quieter, steadier home screen — the loading shimmer stops when rows finish, focus survives posters loading in, and long titles rest after a few passes instead of scrolling all night. [Upstream]
• One deliberate exclusion: official 0.8.11 adds a basic stats overlay. This fork already has one, so the official one is kept dormant

New (from official 0.8.11)

• Long-press Back opens the sidebar from anywhere on the home screen. (@skoruppa)
• Full exit on close — a new Settings → Advanced switch for low-RAM boxes: when on, exit asks for a second Back press, then fully terminates the app and frees its memory. Off by default. (@skoruppa)
• Switch seasons from the episode list — left/right on an episode card in the player's episodes panel steps to the previous/next season. (@haveAnIssue)
• Six-character sign-in codes join the QR flow for linking a nuvio.tv account. (@tapframe)
• Movie recommendation timing — a slider for how close to a film's end the post-play recommendation appears. Only visible if you switch post-play recommendations on (they stay off by default in this fork). (@tapframe)

Improved

Hero trailers fade into the backdrop

Trailers on the home hero now fill the backdrop area and blend into the background instead of playing in a hard-edged window — the same presentation as official.

The one deliberate difference: official zooms trailers a further 35% to hide the black bars baked into some widescreen YouTube trailers, at the cost of cropping and softening every trailer. This build keeps the zoom at 1.0 for full sharpness; on the black theme any residual bars just read as background, so the picture is sharper than official with the same blended look. Tinkerers: the knob is MODERN_TRAILER_OVERSCAN_ZOOM in ModernHomeModels.kt (1.0 here, 1.35 upstream).

Back navigation

• The player OSD closes with one Back press (was two); every in-player panel closes with a single press too. (@halibiram)
• On the home screen, Back walks you home before it walks you out — deep in a row, Back scrolls that row to its start first, and only then reaches the sidebar and exit. The same pattern lands on collection pages. (@skoruppa)
• Continue Watching keeps its place — open a title partway along the row, back out, and you land on the card you left. (@ieno, @skoruppa)
• Back on a fullscreen trailer just closes the trailer, not the screen behind it. (@skoruppa)

A quieter, steadier home screen

• The loading shimmer stops when loading stops — it no longer animates forever after rows have loaded. (@kayochiaradia)
• Focus survives posters loading in — landing on the home screen mid-load no longer drops focus when placeholders become real cards. (@skoruppa)
• Scrolling titles rest after three passes instead of marqueeing indefinitely; move focus away and back to replay. (@kayochiaradia)
• Smoother trailers behind the hero gradient — the gradient overlays are now composited off-screen, so a trailer beneath them no longer forces a full redraw each frame. (@skoruppa)
• A background row refresh no longer shifts the card you're on. (@skoruppa)

Smaller improvements

• mkv files now show a bitrate in stream info — estimated from file size and duration, since Matroska declares no per-track rate. (@ram130)
• SDH filtering strips speaker-change markers (the >>/>>> chevrons from CEA-608-style and YouTube tracks). (@unsuns06)
• CJK titles fall back to English on detail and collection pages when your interface language isn't CJK and TMDB has no translation. (@skoruppa, @halibiram)
• Optical AC-3, HTTP/2 and parallel chunk size now stay device-local rather than following your cloud profile. (@halibiram)
• The add-on URL field keeps focus after the keyboard closes. (@haveAnIssue)
• Updated translations for seventeen languages. (@blueocean2308, @danilopagotto82, @tapframe, @skoruppa)

Fixed

MDBList library posters no longer get stuck half-loaded

With MDBList as the library source, opening the Library could leave a block of posters permanently blank — often half the grid — until you added or removed a title, which healed everything.

MDBList's watchlist carries no artwork, so posters are filled from TMDB afterwards. That fill was tied to the screen that triggered it: navigate away and it was cancelled mid-way, and the refresh logic then treated the half-filled result as complete, so blanks were never retried. Now the fill runs independently in the background, an interrupted pass resumes on the next refresh (fetching only what's missing), the Library fills in progressively, and titles TMDB has no artwork for are remembered for the session. Local, Trakt and Simkl libraries were never affected. Thanks to the community report that confirmed this wasn't a one-off.

The "video decoder may not be responding" error no longer appears over working playback

It used to fire on streams that were simply slow to start (a source preparing a file, a busy debrid/Usenet chain, a large 4K remux filling its buffer), on a flat twenty-second timer that started before the first byte arrived — and since the app kept loading, the picture often started behind the error, which then sat there until you backed out and replayed.

• It clears itself the moment the picture shows — no backing out.
• It waits longer for a slow-but-healthy start — as long as data is still arriving, the wait extends in twenty-second steps up to a one-minute ceiling. A genuinely stalled start still surfaces the error promptly.
• It tells the truth — one message per real cause: this device can't play the video format of this stream (pick another stream), the stream didn't deliver data in time (source slow or unavailable), and the video decoder may not be responding, kept only for the genuine device-level fault where restarting the box is the honest fix.

Smaller fixes (official 0.8.11)

• Watch progress saved during a sync upload can no longer be deleted by the next pull — the sync point is stamped from when the data was read, advances atomically, and is kept per profile. (@ieno)
• Season tabs no longer get stuck after visiting the ratings section. (@skoruppa)

Install

Sideload via ADB or a file manager. This is a personal test build with the application ID com.nuvio.tv.test, so it installs alongside official NuvioTV rather than replacing it.

Licence and attribution

GPL v3.0. All upstream copyright headers, licence text and developer attributions are preserved; no licence text was removed.

• Upstream is NuvioMedia/NuvioTV. All items credited to upstream authors above are their work, merged from the official 0.8.11-beta release. The blended hero-trailer presentation follows the official design. This fork is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NuvioTV project — please do not report issues from this build to upstream.
• The official playback stats overlay (@ram130) is present in the source but deliberately not reachable; its mkv bitrate estimator is used in stream info with attribution preserved.
• The MDBList library source builds on the fork's existing MDBList work (@halibiram-lineage tracking), on top of upstream's tracking architecture.
• Thanks to the community members whose reports pinned down the blank-poster problem and the false startup error.