Technical Starting up and Home rows

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Starting up and Home rows

• Which tab a row is on goes by its catalog: movies, series, sports (sport / sports) and radio to their tabs; StremioK's own YouTube catalogs, and other addons' YouTube or channel catalogs (YouTubio's), to YouTube; live ones (tv, events, live, iptv, your playlists) to IPTV; anime (films and series mixed) only to Discover. Another type (a debrid library's, other) goes by what it lists: mostly films or series (60% of its items), there; title ids (IMDb, TMDB, TVDB, Kitsu, MAL, AniList) and "anime", "series" or "show" in its name or type: Series ("movie" or "film": Movies). Anything still unclear isn't on Home, only in Discover.
• Painting: each row is its own GPU layer (translateZ(0)): on the 2017 TV a D-pad move reached the screen a quarter or more sooner, more than any other change measured.
• Long rows: a row builds its first 30 cards, then 30 more when focus is within 8 of the end. Pictures load for the cards on screen and near it; the others when focus is within 10 of them, or one at a time, nearest first, once no key has been pressed for 3 seconds (not while playing).
• A row's length: a catalog that pages (skip) is asked for more pages (skip = titles so far, 10 at most) until the row is full or a page brings nothing new.
• The last Home rows and addon manifests are saved on the TV, so a launch shows them at once and refreshes them in the background.
• Nothing waits on something unrelated: your addons load without waiting for the IPTV playlists (a big one takes a while to read); the IPTV rows join Home once they're read. On a first load, each row shows as soon as its catalog answers, in its own place: a slower row above it keeps its place with Loading… until it comes.
• Saved only when it changed: playback progress is saved once a minute while it moves (not while paused; always on stopping or leaving), the downloads list only when something in it changed, and a second subtitle's style only when its settings change.
• The rows are saved twice: a small snapshot (40 rows of 20 cards, just poster and name) in the settings storage, read at once, and the whole (up to 60 rows, about 1.5 MB) in the TV's database, written without holding up the remote. The whole replaces the snapshot a moment later, unless fresh rows came first.
• The Modern look (Settings › Appearance › Look): css/modern.css, every rule under body.look-modern (Classic untouched). On the title tabs (not the live ones or Local) the focused title's backdrop fills the screen; its logo, facts and synopsis sit just above the rows, sized per zoom (zoom-110 … zoom-140). Continue Watching and the Calendar use Cinemeta's backdrop and logo for an IMDb id; a YouTube video, its 1280×720 thumbnail (maxresdefault, else hq720). Effects adds fx-full (blur, fades, motion); Auto where the browser can blur behind a panel (backdrop-filter: Tizen 6 and later).
• If the stylesheet doesn't apply on a cold start, it's asked for again (through one extra stylesheet link, at once and after 1, 2, 4 and 8 s). StremioK starts as soon as it applies, or after that anyway (noted in Diagnostics).
• Rows also refresh after 15 minutes. The tab on screen is only redrawn if what it shows changed (Continue Watching never is: its cards don't come from the catalogs), so a refresh doesn't flicker.
• Posters are requested at card size and loaded through a throttled queue that favors the focused card, so the D-pad stays responsive; one that has loaded shows at once when its card is rebuilt. Title-page backdrops, logos and cast photos go through the same queue, sized for where they show. An image already on its way isn't downloaded twice, and one that failed isn't tried again for 10 minutes (its card shows its title instead).