[Bug]: 7.0.0-beta.2 - setting rate to 0 on Android causes an IllegalArgumentException

What happened?

While migrating an app from v6 to v7, I noticed that rate can seemingly be used to pause playback, as mentioned in the docs:

if rate is = 0, it will pause video.

On iOS, the behaviour matches the docs - if the rate is set to 0 like so:

player.rate = paused ? 0 : rate

the playback is paused correctly. This is quite a nice alternative to doing something like if (paused) { player.pause() } else { player.play() }, as I'm already having to set the rate based on a user-selected option.

However, on Android, setting the rate to 0 causes an IllegalArgumentException with this partial stack trace:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException
at androidx.media3.common.util.Assertions.checkArgument(Assertions.java:40)
at androidx.media3.common.PlaybackParameters.<init>(PlaybackParameters.java:61)
at androidx.media3.common.PlaybackParameters.withSpeed(PlaybackParameters.java:88)
at com.margelo.nitro.video.HybridVideoPlayer.rate_delegate$lambda$13(HybridVideoPlayer.kt:181)

Looking at the native code within media3, it has this:

public PlaybackParameters(
      @FloatRange(from = 0, fromInclusive = false) float speed,
      @FloatRange(from = 0, fromInclusive = false) float pitch) {
    Assertions.checkArgument(speed > 0);
    Assertions.checkArgument(pitch > 0);
    this.speed = speed;
    this.pitch = pitch;
    scaledUsPerMs = Math.round(speed * 1000f);
  }

this seems to assert that the speed is always bigger than 0, and if it is zero or lower, the app will crash with the exception.

Open question: is it expected that rate should always be bigger than 0 (and therefore the docs need to be updated), or is rate able to be 0 to pause the video, in which case does that need to be handled within HybridVideoPlayer?

Steps to reproduce

1. On Android, set up a VideoPlayer instance.
2. Set player.rate = 0 (as the docs suggest, to pause playback).
3. Observe that the app crashes with IllegalArgumentException thrown from androidx.media3.common.PlaybackParameters (via HybridVideoPlayer.rate_delegate), whereas the same code pauses correctly on iOS.

Reproduction repository

No response

react-native-video version

7.0.0-beta.2

react-native version

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react-native-nitro-modules version

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Platforms

Android

OS version

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Device

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Architecture

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Expo

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Last working version

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Media / source type

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