DD-3 gives video no exemption: a restricted vehicle must not play it at all. The
gate is read at the single point where media actually opens, so every path that
can start a picture - an explicit play, a gapless arm, a track or channel switch,
a frame-rate-match resume, a reload, and the queue navigation commands of the OS
media session - is covered by one check rather than by a guard at each call site.
A seek can also start playback with no play call, because mpv resumes when it
seeks off the end of a file, so a restricted seek is followed by a pause.
Watch Together needed the pause to be local. A vehicle stopping one peer is not a
room-wide intent: a guest's forced pause is swallowed by the attachment's ledger
rather than published, while a host's still pauses the room, because a host that
kept broadcasting a frozen anchor would stall or rewind every guest it was meant
to protect. The layer that owns a pause owns the resume for it, and one
acknowledgement is recorded per event, so a surplus cannot eat the user's next
real pause.
Plex treats a subtitle stream as forced when its title says "Forced" even
with the API flag unset. Every forced comparison now uses that effective
forced-ness on both sides: the match scorer, the low-metadata hard gate,
the Jellyfin OnlyForced/Smart profile modes, and stream-index negotiation.
Carrying a track choice into the next episode no longer reuses the
same-item identity matchers. A sealed SubtitlePreference (off / track
reference / semantic intent) replaces the id-'navigation' pseudo-track
through the whole preference channel, and cross-item intents hard-require
language and forced-class parity. When the next episode has no track of
the same class, the intent declines and selection falls through to the
server's own per-episode choice instead of latching onto a full track by
position and persisting that mistake back to the server.
Intents wait for pending native tracks under the same catalog-completeness
rule as source ids, so an early decline cannot retire the selection
listener before the real track arrives.
Ref #1716
Plezy declares appCategory="video", so on Android Automotive OS it is a
parked app bound by car app quality DD-2/DD-3: audio must stop when the
vehicle starts driving and must not be resumable while driving. Two paths
kept audio alive. Music playback ran under a mediaPlayback foreground
service whose lifecycle observer was registered for Apple TV only, so it
never paused when Android backgrounded the app. Video pausing hung off
AppLifecycleState.hidden, which Flutter only synthesizes once Android
delivers onStop; a car without the Automotive compatibility mode delivers
onPause alone, which maps to AppLifecycleState.inactive and the player
ignored.
Gate every path that can start audio on a new lifecycle predicate,
automotivePlaybackAllowed, which permits playback on a car only while the
app is resumed and fails closed on an unknown lifecycle state. That covers
explicit play, gapless arming and track transitions, live retry and
channel switch, frame-rate-match resume, VOD/live startup, and the queue
navigation commands of the OS media session, plus a last-resort pause for
when the platform player resumes itself on native audio-focus regain.
Playback authority on the media-session router is deliberately left alone:
the router consumes a denied event, so gating it would swallow PauseEvent
and leave the OS unable to stop audio. Reacting to lifecycle callbacks is
the mechanism the platform documents as sufficient, so no android.car
dependency is added.
The music queue no longer requests POST_NOTIFICATIONS on a car, where the
foreground service and its notification never start: there is nothing to
authorize, and the prompt would take focus and make the gate discard the
first play intent.
Detect the form factor too: FEATURE_AUTOMOTIVE now vetoes the Android TV
verdict, so a rotary-only head unit no longer inherits the leanback
experience. Picture-in-picture is gated on FEATURE_PICTURE_IN_PICTURE,
which cars lack, so the app's UI cannot stay on screen while driving, and
nothing forces a preferred orientation on a fixed-orientation display.
The old bool meant "attempt was current and handled", so callers could
not distinguish a real pre-open failure (old stream still loaded) from
success — the distinction the #1520 recovery needs.
A paused-but-alive player keeps its MediaCodec decoders and tunneled
passthrough AudioTrack while Plezy sits in the background, which can
degrade playback in every other app on shared-pipeline TV SoCs until
force-stop. After a 30s grace on Android TV the player is stopped
(retaining session state); returning reloads in place, or re-tunes the
channel for live TV.