Report AirPlay media selection issues to Apple

[defagos]

As a Pillarbox developer I want to avoid introducing nasty workarounds for corner cases. Player item currentMediaSelection is currently broken over AirPlay resulting in minor bugs. This issue should be reported to Apple.

Acceptance criteria

• currentMediaSelection issues have been reported to Apple.

Hints

• currentMediaSelection reports updates during playback but does not deliver the initial value. Current workaround is to wait until the player is ready to play, at which point reading the property delivers the current value. A publisher can then be used to get further updates resulting from media selection updates triggered by the user.
• currentMediaSelection is incorrect over AirPlay, which can simply be observed by periodically logging the value for the current item (using a KVO-publisher should be avoided for the bug report because of the issue described above). As a result the following fails with Pillarbox as well as the vanilla player and player UI:
  • Open Apple 16:9 basic example.
  • Pick Japanese SDH subtitles so that the selection is saved with MediaAccessibility.
  • Close the player.
  • Open the player. Subtitles are correctly set in Japanese and marked as such in the selection menu.
  • Enable AirPlay from the Control Center.
  • Open the player. Subtitles are not incorrectly reported as English SDH.

Tasks

• Check behavior with various iOS / tvOS version and system language / SDH / AD combinations in the following scenarios (report what language is returned by currentMediaSelection and which subtitles, if any, are visible on screen):
  • Pillarbox player, custom UI.
  • Pillarbox player, system UI.
  • Vanilla player and UI.
• Write bug report.
• Document as known issue in Pillarbox documentation.

[defagos]

This is a tvOS bug since the behavior does not depend on the casting device iOS version, rather on the receiver tvOS version. This issue was partially fixed in tvOS 18 (tested with tvOS 18 beta):

• The reported subtitle selection is now correct on the casting device...
• ... but the subtitles are not displayed on the receiver.