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-nt.9.1 follows nt.9 with thumbnails made by your box's hardware decoder, a smoother start after updating, and a big round of fixes from your reports. Still on official NuvioTV 1.1.0-beta.9, and it installs over nt.9 keeping all your settings.

Thumbnails

• Thumbnails are made by your box's hardware decoder. Much faster on most boxes: a 4K film's set in 11 seconds instead of about 45 on a 2 GB Xiaomi TV box, and HD titles on every box. On 2 GB boxes without their own video memory, like the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, 4K titles use it only when the box has memory to spare. When it doesn't, Arc goes straight to the usual way, which is now quicker as well (a 4K film's set in 31 to 35 seconds instead of 46).
• New switch: Settings > Playback > Player Interface > Hardware decoder for thumbnails. On by default. If thumbnails ever look wrong or your box struggles, turn it off and they are made the usual way.
• Thumbnails come from a lighter copy first, on every box, before and during play. As soon as you pick a stream, Arc finds a lighter copy of the same film in your other sources (720p first, then 1080p, then 4K, and only then the film itself), checks a few of its pictures against your film and makes the thumbnails from it. It learns which sources give good copies quickly and tries the others last. The copy gets going the moment its link opens and makes its first pictures before the thumbnails screen is even up, so the first thumbnails show sooner. Nothing to set up: the old "Thumbnails from a copy" switch is gone, it is simply on. A cached TorBox copy may be added to your TorBox list for a few minutes and removed again.
• Media servers away from home use a lighter copy straight away. The copy is chosen within about a second of pressing play, instead of pulling every picture from your server first, and one doubtful picture no longer throws a good copy away.
• No more endless "Generating thumbnails" screen. If the player restarted at the wrong moment (it can when the TV reports its sound formats late), the screen could spin forever with the film hidden behind it. It now carries on with the restarted player, and any screen that stops making progress gets out of the way.
• H.264 films get hardware thumbnails on Amlogic boxes too (Ugoos, Xiaomi), where the decoder used to give up and fall back.

Playback

• Less memory churn during playback, most of all on 2 GB boxes: picture subtitles (Blu-ray style) are now decoded only for the track you are watching and only when each line is due, instead of every subtitle in the file as it downloads. TrueHD sound and the downloader also make far fewer throwaway copies.
• Smoother first minutes after installing or updating. Arc now tells Android which parts of the player to prepare ahead, so the first films after an update no longer stutter while Android catches up. (#8)
• Heavy films keep more buffer on 2 GB boxes. The Automatic speed-up no longer borrows buffer memory before the film is on screen, and never takes it below eight seconds of film. A heavy film also starts as soon as its buffer is full.
• The film's buffer no longer starts at a fraction of its size after the thumbnails screen on 2 GB boxes (it could start at 20 MB).
• Fewer false alarms on the Fire TV Stick. Fire OS memory warnings only shrink the buffer when the box's own numbers agree, and 4K films keep more memory free for the video decoder.
• Pressing Play is several seconds quicker when you have two or more media servers. Arc no longer ranks all your sources a second time, and ranking itself is about four times faster in tests.
• The film starts cleanly after the thumbnails screen on 2 GB boxes. Picking the film up again after the screen could trip a stream error and leave it paused until you pressed Play. Arc now rebuilds the player cleanly at that point, any restart after an error carries on playing, and Automatic speed-up no longer opens more downloads than TorBox allows.
• Leaving a film no longer freezes the screen for a second on boxes with a big buffer.
• Automatic speed-up remembers servers that block extra downloads partway through a film. Arc keeps that server to one download for a day, longer if it happens again (up to a week). (#79)

Picture, sound and badges

• Player badges show what is actually playing, one badge each. A Dolby Vision WEB-DL with DD+ Atmos now shows DV, DD+ and Atmos instead of DV, HDR10, HDR, Atmos, DD+ and DD.
• Dolby Vision MKV files played as HDR10 now tell the TV they are HDR10 (or HLG for profile 8.4). With "Always remove DV" the picture used to reach the decoder without its colour details.

Subtitles

• Turning subtitles off in the player no longer changes your preferred language. Off applies to that title only, and if your language had been switched to None this way, it comes back by itself.
• The subtitle background keeps the opacity you set when drop shadow is on. It used to turn almost black. (#89)
• Subtitle size moves in steps of 5 instead of 10, in Settings and in the player. (#88)
• Four new subtitle fonts: Roboto, Montserrat, Noto Sans Semi-Bold and Asap Condensed. They work with every subtitle style option (colour, background, outline, shadow, size, bold, position) on both players. With Noto Sans Semi-Bold, subtitles in Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Bengali and Tamil show in Noto too, and Chinese and Japanese use your box's own Noto font on the standard player.
• DM Sans subtitles now really show in DM Sans on Libmpv.

Calendar and Home

• Library shows from anime add-ons show up in the Calendar and Coming up, and a show that can't be matched yet is tried again the next day instead of a week later.
• US evening shows land on the right day in Australia, the UK and elsewhere when the date comes from an add-on.
• Your Calendar and Coming up settings now follow your account to all your boxes.
• Continue watching and unsent watched changes are kept safe across updates. They are now saved in a form a future build can always read.
• The newest episode is no longer skipped in Coming up when the next one is already announced.

Screens

• The library button only counts lists it can change. With MDBList as your library source, a show in one of your smart, liked or other people's lists no longer shows "Remove from library" while missing from your Library; pressing it adds it to your Watchlist, and the message says what really happened.
• Parental guide shows for titles where IMDb leaves out the vote count.
• Series pages no longer wait on an episode-ratings server that no longer exists.
• Titles under the posters on cast pages are no longer cut off, and the Production and Networks logos scroll fully into view on details pages without Trakt comments.

Install

The update banner in the app installs this release for you. Or download the APK for your device below and install it over the top (your data is kept):

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

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-nt.9.1, 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-beta.9.
• 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.
• 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-nt.9.1 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.