[epicfail]

As far as I know this has always been the behaviour when extra fanart is enabled. I had a discussion with Marcel a long ways back about it and I think we came to the conclusion that it is just the way Kodi works. The 'problem' (as I understand it) is that the skinning engine just wants to use the standard Kodi background from the library scrape. When you enable extra fanart, it's the skin helper the provides the fanart specification to the skinning engine as an 'update' (by way of a variable managed through the skin helper and used by the skin). However, the skin helper is running in a thread separate from the skin engine. This means that there is a potential gap between when a new library item is selected and the skin engine displays the standard background and when the skin helper serves up the background from the extra fanart lists. On a powerful platform (e.g. windows htpc) this results in an occasional flicker of the background art when an item is first selected. This is where I noticed this effect -- a small annoyance for me. On a platform with more limited processing power, I can imagine much larger and much more noticeable gap -- possibly on the order of a second -- which would be very annoying. I'm not sure this can be helped, but Marcel can comment further.

I just wanted to note that this 'problem' is definitely not new -- I have seen it since the very early beta's of the skin for Jarvis (which was also in beta at the time).

Almost correct... The extrafanart is indeed set by the skinhelper service but this is done in just a few milliseconds. The problem is that Kodi uses a so called multiimage control to display a path of images and Kodi takes a little while to load the images from that path into memory. On fast systems you will not very likely see this but on slower systems this is noticable.

I'm not sure if I can even solve this but I'll give it a try later this week.

EDIT: I might have found a fix. Please try the next beta to see if it's resolved.

Thx marcelveldt....it seems fixed. Looks very smooth now.