Nuvio Arc is my experimental fork of Nuvio for trying new ideas, not a replacement for the official app. It runs on the same boxes and works best on stronger ones. It's a one-person hobby project: report problems or ideas in this repo's Issues (best effort) or at r/NuvioForks, and please don't report issues from this build to the official Nuvio GitHub or Discord.

Nuvio Arc 1.1.0-arc.3 is built on official NuvioTV 1.1.0, the same base as 1.1.0-arc.2. It installs over 1.1.0-arc.2 and keeps all your settings.

This one is a tune-up. No big new features this time: I went through Arc part by part and fixed what I found, together with what the reports sent from inside the app showed. Many of these fixes come from single reports and from reading through how Arc behaves, and I haven't been able to check every one on a box yet, so if something below still happens to you, please send a report.

The big ones:

• Fewer crashes, above all on very large set-ups and on small boxes.
• No more surprise sign-outs when the account service has a hiccup.
• Home keeps up when you press Up or Down very quickly, mostly on a Fire Stick or other small box.
• Arc tells you when your TV isn't keeping the film's frame rate, and what to do about it.
• Scout fits a kids profile, and its genre rows stay where you put them on Home.
• Trakt keeps scrobbling, and watched ticks stay put.

Steadier

• Arc no longer closes itself half a minute after opening on set-ups with very large add-on catalogue lists. Arc saved the details of all your add-ons as one block, and with hundreds of catalogues that block grew to tens of MB and ran Arc out of memory at start-up. The details now go to a file a little at a time. Limit: the first start after the update fetches the add-on details again if the old save was very large, so Home can take a few seconds longer that one time.
• Very large set-ups play more smoothly. Local plugin searches no longer start again behind a film that is already playing; they run when you open the sources panel. Limits: a source that lists more than 300 streams for one title shows its first 300, and an add-on that can't send a huge catalogue in pages shows its first 2,000 entries in that row. With local plugin scrapers on, a film started from Continue watching makes its thumbnails from the film itself, not from a lighter copy, until you open the sources panel once.
• No more surprise sign-outs. Arc no longer signs you out and clears your trackers, media servers and settings when the account service has a hiccup in the middle of a session. A sign-in that was really revoked still signs out. Continue watching and your watched ticks can no longer be emptied, or new progress lost, while Arc's sign-in is being restored: progress made in that time uploads once the sign-in is back.
• MDBList: Arc should no longer close in the middle of a film on small boxes with a long MDBList history. Every 15 minutes Arc saved your whole MDBList history in one go, also while a film played, and on a 1 GB Fire TV Stick with memory nearly full that could close Arc. The background refresh now waits until the player is closed, and a save that doesn't fit is skipped and tried again 15 minutes later. A refresh you start yourself still runs straight away.
• Arc no longer piles up half-closed players when sources keep failing. Each failed source rebuilt the player while the old one could still be closing on a slow box, holding on to its memory, and a few of those could run the box out of memory. Arc now waits a moment for the old player first. Limit: when that happens the next source can take up to 4 seconds longer to start.
• Shield: a fix for Arc hanging for several seconds right after the opening animation, where Android then offered to close Arc. I have no Shield to check it on, so please tell me if it still happens. On a Fire TV Stick 4K Max the animation played and finished cleanly 30 starts in a row.
• 2 GB boxes use less memory for styled subtitles. Anime with heavily styled signs could fill 128 MB beside the film; small boxes now keep 32 MB and redraw signs more often, and the film buffer gives way sooner when the box is nearly out of memory.
• TVs that load their own library into every app (seen on a Hisense) should no longer lose Arc to too many open pictures. Arc stops pre-loading posters into memory and lets some go when it holds too many at once.
• Three more ways Arc could close are fixed: coming back to a Mix page right after an episode ended, switching your watch progress or library to a tracker that answers "too many requests" (your choice is kept and Arc tries again later), and opening a collection folder with two sources that point at the same catalogue.

Home and Scout

• Home keeps up better when you press Up or Down very quickly. A row you haven't seen yet is prepared before it scrolls in, the top area waits while you're stepping quickly and catches up when you pause, and poster pre-loading steps back while a list is moving and picks up again the moment it stops. Nothing that pre-loads was removed. On a Fire TV Stick 4K Max, with presses 150 ms apart, the slowest frames went from about 100 ms to about 73 ms and about a fifth more frames were drawn. At a normal pace nothing changes.
• A Home row that failed to load comes back on its own after about half a minute (a server still waking, an add-on hiccup), without restarting Arc. Limit: one automatic retry; after that it's tried again when you return to Home after 15 minutes.
• Scout no longer fills a kids profile with grown-up picks. Scout now reads the age ratings of what a profile watches, and when nearly all of it is for kids, nothing rated above that level shows in Picked for you, the taste rows, Because you watched, Hidden gems, New for you or Trending for you. The top-up comes from popular kids and family titles instead of what's popular for everyone. Profiles that watch teen or adult titles in normal amounts, family profiles shared by parents and kids included, are not changed. Limits: it goes by US ratings from TMDB, and a title with no US rating stays only when TMDB lists it as Family or Kids. It's not a parental lock: Search, Home rows and add-ons are unchanged. The picks update the next time Scout rebuilds them. A profile with very few suitable picks can end up with no Scout rows on Home for now (a row needs at least eight picks); its picks are still on the Scout page.
• Scout's genre rows stay where you put them on Home. Scout builds its genre rows again every day, and when the genres changed the new rows jumped to the top of Home and pushed your own catalogs around. Now each genre row has a fixed place: the genre in it can change from day to day, but the row stays where you moved it. Genre rows also get their own switch, Rows by genre (Scout settings > On Home), so you can keep Picked for you and turn the genre rows off. Limits: after the update the genre rows take the place of the old ones once. A day with fewer genres leaves a place empty until the row comes back. If you had switched Picked for you off, Rows by genre starts off too.
• Opening a title asks your add-on again, even right after a failure. When AIOStreams couldn't get details from the meta add-on behind it, Arc stopped asking that AIOStreams for up to 10 minutes and showed HTTP 429, although AIOStreams never sent one. Opening a title now always asks, and the message only says 429 when the add-on really sent it. Limit: if your meta add-on itself is down, the title page still can't show its details.
• New-episode cards for older shows no longer go missing for the rest of the session after a network hiccup (this only affected viewers with more than 32 active shows), and the first card of a row that filled in while you were on it gets its logo and backdrop like its neighbours.

Playback

• Arc notices when your TV isn't keeping the film's frame rate, and tells you once. After a frame rate switch Arc times the screen for four seconds. If it runs at another rate than it should (for example 24.000 Hz for a 23.976 film, which shows as a small regular stutter), the display info at the top right comes back with a Measured row and one line saying so. The first time you then pause, a card explains the cause and the fix: on newer TVs it's QMS, which you turn off on the TV, or you let Arc turn frame rate matching off. The card comes once per TV and never over a playing film. Limits: Arc can show the problem, not cure it, and turning matching off from the card applies from the next film. On a Fire TV Stick the screen can't be timed reliably after a normal switch, so the Measured row is hidden there. I have no QMS TV, so this part is untested on one.
• A film that won't start says why more often. When nothing played after 20 seconds Arc always said the stream did not deliver data in time, even when the box's video decoder was the part that hung or the server had answered with an error. Now a stuck decoder gets the decoder message (restart the box), and a server that refused the stream shows its answer, for example HTTP 500. Limit: the wait is still 20 seconds and only the message changes; a file the box can't decode still won't play.
• Less time lost on slow and busy sources. An MP4 that arrives slowly but steadily is no longer restarted from its first byte up to three times, which threw away about 16 seconds. A source that answers "too many requests" before the film has started is given up on after 15 seconds, so the next source or the message comes sooner. And a film on a shaky link keeps recovering by itself through a long evening, because the automatic retries come back after a minute of clean playback. Limits: a very slow source can still take too long to start, and a link that fails every few seconds still ends on the error screen after five tries.
• A paused film stays paused when the player has to restart, for example after changing the audio or subtitle track on a Jellyfin, Emby or Plex stream. Before, it started playing by itself.
• Back near the end of a film, with Post-play recommendations on, hides the controls or closes the open panel as it should. Before, it could close the film while the recommendation was loading.
• Next episode no longer fails or jumps to another source because the previous episode's player was slow to close.
• Strip HDR10+ leaves other video alone. With Strip HDR10+ switched on, some H.264 and MPEG-2 films in MP4 or TS files gave sound with no picture or a broken start on TVs without Dolby Vision. They play with their picture again. MKV files were never affected.
• Subtitles. A subtitle delay set for one episode no longer follows you into the next one. Automatic subtitle sync keeps signs and typeset lines in ASS subtitles where they belong instead of moving them onto the nearest spoken line (not in the plain-text fallback renderer). And your text colour stays ticked in Subtitle style when opacity is below 100 %; picking a new colour still sets opacity back to 100 %.

Thumbnails and TorBox

• Saved thumbnails aren't thrown away after three days while you're still watching a film or series over several evenings. Sets made before this update are corrected the next time the title is played. MP4 files with an unusual timing table no longer show thumbnails from the wrong place.
• TorBox: the next episode isn't added to your list before you play it. With "Search sources before Play" and auto-play on, Arc no longer adds the next episode to your TorBox list ahead of time. Limit: next-episode thumbnails are only prepared ahead when that release is already in your TorBox list; otherwise they're made after you press Play.
• TorBox: a title Arc added only to make thumbnails is cleaned up about a minute after the next start, if Arc was closed before it could remove it. Limit: if TorBox can't confirm that Arc added the item, or the removal fails on a record older than 6 hours, it stays in your list.

Trackers and media servers

• Trakt keeps scrobbling. A show could stop scrobbling and stop taking "mark watched" until Arc was restarted, and marks for your other trackers queued up behind it.
• Watched ticks stay put with Trakt as the Watch Progress source. Opening a series no longer wipes the ticks saved on the box before Trakt has answered, and ticks on specials stay. Limit: an episode you un-watch on the Trakt site keeps its tick on the box until Trakt can be reached.
• Simkl no longer mixes up a film and a show that share a TMDB or TVDB number, so un-watching a film can't remove a show from your Simkl list. This only affected add-ons that use tmdb: or tvdb: ids.
• WeTrakr shows can be removed from the library again. Shows WeTrakr files as waiting for new episodes stayed under Watching while Arc said they were removed. Now they're removed on WeTrakr too, and if WeTrakr refuses, Arc says so. Limit: WeTrakr may put a caught-up show back under Watching by itself when a new episode comes out.
• Silo: Mark as watched reaches your server when you stopped the title partway in the last 10 minutes, and a title that failed to start, or that you backed out of while it was loading, can be marked as watched without restarting Arc.
• Plex: more than nine servers. After Plex sign-in, the list of servers to choose from now scrolls. Before, an account with many servers only showed the first nine or so.

Smaller things

• Settings search finds the Nuvio V2 look settings. Interface scale, Visual style, Accent, Glass, Focus style and the other V2 appearance settings turn up when you search, and a result takes you straight to the right card or slider. Results only show settings that exist in the interface you're using.
• Format check: Dolby Vision and Dolby Digital Plus tests you can trust. The Dolby Vision test clips were one-second still colour bars, and a TV that plays Dolby Vision fine could show a red or green screen and get a fault. Profiles 5, 7, 8.1 and 8.4 now play four to five seconds of a moving picture, and a Dolby Vision warning comes only when the box can't play the clip or Arc had to play it without Dolby Vision. The Dolby Digital Plus clips run for six seconds, so a receiver has time to lock on. Limits: the Atmos test clips are still silent, so your receiver shows Atmos without a tone to hear. The two AV1 Dolby Vision clips are unchanged. The app grows by about 2 MB.
• A plain note on sources in About. Settings > About > Licenses & attribution has a new row, "Your sources, your responsibility". It says what Arc is: a player that comes with no films, shows or streams, where everything you play comes from a source you connected yourself. Limit: English only for now.
• Crash and problem reports now say how large your set-up is. Counts only: how many add-ons and catalogues, how many library, watched and watch progress entries on the current profile, how much Arc has saved on the box and how many files it has open. No add-on names, titles or addresses. It lets me see when a very large set-up is what strains Arc.

Download

• app-full-arm64-v8a-release.apk for most current boxes (Shield, Ugoos, Google TV). SHA-256: e207a9b1330f38d400b10c742af17c711cef350bdd25b28ea1d980edb5fb370f
• app-full-armeabi-v7a-release.apk for the Fire TV Stick and other 32-bit devices. SHA-256: 6c6829d77afc80c4892d92f865308ffe205704a1f23e25af00ed68a66d2a9c61

Nuvio Arc installs over earlier Nuvio Arc and Nuvio-test builds, keeps all your settings, profiles and sign-ins, and still installs next to the official Nuvio. Version 1.1.0-arc.3, package com.nuvio.tv.test.

Licence and attribution

GPL v3.0. Upstream copyright headers, licence text and developer attributions are preserved.

• Upstream: NuvioMedia/NuvioTV, including compatible changes through 1.1.0.
• The surround passthrough engine is ported from pull request 3107 in the official app by halibiram, with ram130. Media servers build on pull request 3728 in the official app by tapframe.
• Atmos detection in MKV files is by HeliumMarcos (halibiram#47).
• Floppy and the original tracker design are by dannyvfilms (NuvioMedia/NuvioTV#3811).
• The idea for Mixes comes from TV Mix in Nuvio-ReSeq.
• AV1 software decoding uses dav1d by VideoLAN and the dav1d authors (BSD 2-Clause), with cpu_features by Google (Apache 2.0). Calendar episode times come from TVmaze and TheTVDB (metadata provided by TheTVDB). Subtitle fonts Roboto, Montserrat, Noto Sans and Asap Condensed are under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. All are credited under Settings > About > Licenses & attribution.
• Source for this build: tag 1.1.0-arc.3 in this repository.
• Nuvio Arc is not affiliated with or endorsed by the NuvioTV project.

Nuvio Arc is built on Nuvio. If you enjoy it, support the Nuvio team at nuvio.tv/support.