Apple TV app UI Issues

[acnp77 67]

@Luke

Hi, I’m experiencing a consistent UI display issue on Apple TV 4K devices with the Emby app.

Issue:

• While scrolling the Movies library and Home Screen, poster images flicker between the correct poster and a generic white logo.

• Happens on local and remote connections, all user accounts.

• Reinstalling the app does not resolve the issue.

• Other Emby clients (web, iOS) display posters correctly, so this appears Apple TV app-specific.

Environment:

• Apple TV model: 4K

• tvOS version: 18.6

• Emby Apple TV app version: 2.0.1. (7)

• Emby Server version: 4.8.11.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the Movies library or Emby Home Screen on Apple TV.

2. Scroll through the movie posters.

3. Observe flicker between poster and generic image.

Additional notes:

• Issue occurs consistently on two Apple TV 4K for all users, local & remote connections.

• Reinstalling the app and switching networks do not help.

• Short video of the flicker attached.

• Performance of all HW components is good, and with all other clients browsing is very fast and displays correctly.

• In addition, when scrolling through the movie library fast (long press "arrow down") it stops every few seconds, even if I did not reach the end of the list yet. Then I need to press "arrow down" again for it to continue. Sometimes it does not continue to the end at all and I need to exit the screen and try again.

Request:
Any guidance or confirmation if these issues are known bugs would be appreciated. Thanks!

[SamES 1056]

4 hours ago, acnp77 said:

While scrolling the Movies library and Home Screen, poster images flicker between the correct poster and a generic white logo.

This is probably an OS bug.  Can you update to the latest tvOS 26 release?

4 hours ago, acnp77 said:

tvOS version: 18.6

 

Unfortunately we don't have as much control of the dynamic loading of images/items when scrolling longs lists as we do in the web client.

[acnp77 67]

40 minutes ago, SamES said:

This is probably an OS bug.  Can you update to the latest tvOS 26 release?

Thanks a lot for your input. I updated to tvOS 26.1. - The issue remains.

I really have the feeling that something in the UI of the tvOS emby app is off... especially this further issue does not seem to have to do with tvOS:
 

5 hours ago, acnp77 said:

In addition, when scrolling through the movie library fast (long press "arrow down") it stops every few seconds, even if I did not reach the end of the list yet. Then I need to press "arrow down" again for it to continue. Sometimes it does not continue to the end at all and I need to exit the screen and try again.

 

[SamES 1056]

How many items in the library?

[acnp77 67]

8 hours ago, SamES said:

How many items in the library?

around 850 items in the movie library. Music and TV Shows are very small, around 200 items together. 

I noticed that the "flickering" also occurs when displaying the icons of "my media" at the top of the home-screen. It also happens when switching screens, e.g. when navigating from a movie detail screen to home-screen. So it is not limited to the movie library or to scrolling long lists.

To summarize:

Flickering like shown in the video attached occurs when:
- scrolling the 850 items movie lib
- switching screens (e.g. movie detail screen navigate to home screen)
- scrolling horizontally through "latest" items

- in addition, scrolling through the movies lib will not scroll to the end of list by pressing "arrow down", but takes several attempts to scroll to the bottom of the list.
- Sometimes scrolling to the bottom of the movie page is not possible at all and just gets "stuck" so I need to exit the page and start from the top again to reach the end of the list of movie posters.

Can you reproduce this behavior of the UI?

@KriminalKMay this be consistent with your issue from this post or do you have a different issue? Thanks

 

In this recent post, in the screenshot provided, I can also see some white logo (not exactly the same as mine) overlaying some, but not all movie posters. Could this be related?

 

Edited November 12, 2025 by acnp77

[supersaugi 9]

@acnp77

Do you have the same problem that I posted here?

 

[acnp77 67]

2 hours ago, supersaugi said:

Do you have the same problem that I posted here?

Thanks for posting this. I am not sure if this is the same issue, but it seems related to my post, and shows that there is most definitely a problem with the tvOS emby app UI.
I can confirm the flickering you experienced. I also see in your video, that the movie posters in the bottom row have not loaded, and instead a generic white logo is displayed.

I have searched the forum for related posts, and see that there are a few.

It is difficult to precisely pinpoint the issue, but the user experience is definitely not great on Apple TV, which is a shame, because the rest of the emby experience is great and Apple TV is a widely used client. There are a few UI glitches that need to be addressed here. Playback of content on the other hand, is great.

[SamES 1056]

I'll take a look at it in case something has changed recently to cause this

Edited November 12, 2025 by SamES

[acnp77 67]

2 hours ago, SamES said:

I'll take a look at it in case something has changed recently to cause this

Thank you! If you need any additional info or testing please let me know.

[girmscheid 2]

Same issue here.  

[visproduction 315]

Related?
 

Quote

• Select ‘Match Content’ and turn off ‘Match Dynamic Range’ and ‘Match Frame Rate.’

https://robotpoweredhome.com/apple-tv-flickering-screen/

[girmscheid 2]

30 minutes ago, visproduction said:

Related?
 

https://robotpoweredhome.com/apple-tv-flickering-screen/

No.  I have these settings correct.  Only happens while browsing the library for me.

[Luke 42077]

Hi, we are looking into this. Thanks.

[SamES 1056]

On 12/11/2025 at 02:35, acnp77 said:

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open the Movies library or Emby Home Screen on Apple TV.

2. Scroll through the movie posters.

3. Observe flicker between poster and generic image.

I can reduce this effect so that you don't see the placeholder flicker when there is an existing image.

On 12/11/2025 at 02:35, acnp77 said:

In addition, when scrolling through the movie library fast (long press "arrow down") it stops every few seconds, even if I did not reach the end of the list yet. Then I need to press "arrow down" again for it to continue. Sometimes it does not continue to the end at all and I need to exit the screen and try again.

I can reproduce this if I use my TV remote to scroll through the list, but if I use the Apple TV remote it works perfectly. I also see this same issue on the ATV Home screen or the Settings menus when using the TV remote, so it is not unique to the app.  I suspect the way that keypress events are being sent to the ATV from the TV remote control causes it tor scroll badly.

For example, with the ATV remote I can quickly scroll through my whole video library with minimal lag. There is a very brief pause while new items load, but it is very brief and doesn't ever appear to be stuck. However, using my Samsung TV remote it does get stuck and I have to release they keys for several seconds before it becomes responsive again. 

Are using the ATV remote or TV remote?

On 12/11/2025 at 20:08, acnp77 said:

Flickering like shown in the video attached occurs when:
- scrolling the 850 items movie lib
- switching screens (e.g. movie detail screen navigate to home screen)
- scrolling horizontally through "latest" items

This flickering is unavoidable as it's caused by the ATV refreshing the screen when new items are added or the screen is refreshed when returning from a details page. Unfortunately this is not as smooth as normal web based app.

My fix for the plaholder images should make this a little less unpleasant.

[visproduction 315]

Apple is known for trying to get any page to open quickly.  They apparently use a heavy pre-cache for images on Apple TV and populate a cache directory so when the user comes back images on any page opens quickly.  A different player / browser / TV App can handle this in a different way.   You can easily choose to load the visible images only plus perhaps the next 20 after a few seconds and then stop.  This would make going to another page quicker.  I am guessing that these differences are more just choices made in the code to best present the images by the product dev team for each app.  I would really expect them all to perform the exact same way, just like you wouldn't expect two sports car brands to drive the same.

[SamES 1056]

6 hours ago, visproduction said:

Apple is known for trying to get any page to open quickly.  They apparently use a heavy pre-cache for images on Apple TV and populate a cache directory so when the user comes back images on any page opens quickly.  A different player / browser / TV App can handle this in a different way.   You can easily choose to load the visible images only plus perhaps the next 20 after a few seconds and then stop.  This would make going to another page quicker.  I am guessing that these differences are more just choices made in the code to best present the images by the product dev team for each app.  I would really expect them all to perform the exact same way, just like you wouldn't expect two sports car brands to drive the same.

This is in't about image loading, it's about actually pulling the items and data from the server.  We pull those in chunks rather than everything the user has in their library as that would make every page load slow. The brief/pause flicker is the tvOS framework binding the new items which causes it to relayout/rfresh the view. We could eliminate it by loading every item data on page load, but that causes other issues/delays.

[acnp77 67]

21 hours ago, SamES said:

I can reduce this effect so that you don't see the placeholder flicker when there is an existing image.

Great, this would be much appreciated

21 hours ago, SamES said:

Are using the ATV remote or TV remote?

I am using the Apple TV remote only.

What I observe is:
- Not scrolling to the end (e.g. movie lib), while pressing "arrow down" long key-press.
- After releasing the key and pressing again, scrolling continues most of the times.
- In some cases (regularly) I cannot scroll to the end at all, even after pausing and pressing the key again.
- The bar in the right side of the screen with the letters A-Z does not always correspond to the display of movie-titles when scrolling.

21 hours ago, SamES said:

This flickering is unavoidable as it's caused by the ATV refreshing the screen when new items are added or the screen is refreshed when returning from a details page. Unfortunately this is not as smooth as normal web based app.

My fix for the plaholder images should make this a little less unpleasant.

Thank you!

 

If you need more infos/testing, please let me know.

[SamES 1056]

11 minutes ago, acnp77 said:

21 hours ago, SamES said:

I can reduce this effect so that you don't see the placeholder flicker when there is an existing image.

Great, this would be much appreciated

This should be in the next release.

11 minutes ago, acnp77 said:

I am using the Apple TV remote only.

What I observe is:
- Not scrolling to the end (e.g. movie lib), while pressing "arrow down" long key-press.
- After releasing the key and pressing again, scrolling continues most of the times.
- In some cases (regularly) I cannot scroll to the end at all, even after pausing and pressing the key again.
- The bar in the right side of the screen with the letters A-Z does not always correspond to the display of movie-titles when scrolling.

Ah, I have the older touch style remote without up/down buttons, but what you describe sounds similar to what I experience with my standard TV remote.  I don't always remember it being like this, so I wonder if this is a glitch that has crept into the OS. I even tried an app version from 18 months ago and it had the same issue.  I also see this on the standard Apple TV app screen and settings menu items. 

On the ATV app screen, what happens if you hold the down button and scroll to the bottom of the list, then keep holding down for 5 seconds.  When you release the key, can you immediatly scroll up or does it appear frozen for a few seconds?

Interesting that you see a-z characters appear on the right hand side. I never see that all, and I've tried hard to make that functionality work!

[acnp77 67]

On 11/21/2025 at 11:58 AM, SamES said:

This should be in the next release.

I am now on ATV release 2.0.2 from Nov 21st and the issue with "generic logo images" flickering seems resolved. This was really fast, thanks a lot 

The "screen-refresh- flickering" remains, but this is a separate issue, and I understand it is hard to resolve. It is not a big deal.

On 11/21/2025 at 11:58 AM, SamES said:

On the ATV app screen, what happens if you hold the down button and scroll to the bottom of the list, then keep holding down for 5 seconds.  When you release the key, can you immediatly scroll up or does it appear frozen for a few seconds?

I can immediately scroll up, no issues.

On 11/21/2025 at 11:58 AM, SamES said:

Interesting that you see a-z characters appear on the right hand side. I never see that all, and I've tried hard to make that functionality work!

I am sorry, I must have been mistaken, all I can see is the area with small dots when scrolling fast through the movie lib.

The problem that I cannot scroll through my whole movie lib with one keypress on my Apple TV remote remains.
As you already said, it really seems to be related to the way the remote functions. I use the ATV-remote with touch disabled in the ATV settings.
If I remember correctly this has not always been like this - it used to work in the past.

To test, I activated touch, and when scrolling through the lib via touch, it works very well, fast and all the way to the last library item.
Interestingly, when scrolling from bottom to top, I have no problem.

I also tested the "long-keypress down" to scroll through items in other ATV apps, and there it works. It stalls for a very short moment at some points, so also far from perfect, but I can always scroll to the end in all apps I have tested.

One minor thing, just for info, in the 2.0.2. release, under "latest movies" I now find around 400 items. I do not know if this is intended

Let me know if I can help regarding the remote-control topic.

 

 

Edited November 24, 2025 by acnp77

[SamES 1056]

Thanks that's really helpful. I agree it hasn't always been like this and the fact that you see the stall in other apps suggests something in the OS has changed.  It's really hard to pin down why the scrolling eventually stops.  I think it's a timing issue, but also possibly not one that we can easily avoid/work-around.  Let's see what the next OS release does for this

[KriminalK 0]

On 11/11/2025 at 8:22 PM, SamES said:

This is probably an OS bug.  Can you update to the latest tvOS 26 release?

 

Unfortunately we don't have as much control of the dynamic loading of images/items when scrolling longs lists as we do in the web client.

im on tvos 26.2 beta 3

[supersaugi 9]

I'm still having the problem.

It works perfectly with Infuse.