Ugh. As much as I like vlc, I have to agree. Mini rant time.
It absolutely boggles my mind that the vlc devs refuse to implement automatic loading of prev/next tracks in the same folder, a basic feature that pretty much every other major player has, because it’s not their intended use pattern.
This is a convenience feature to save the user selecting tracks and making a playlist every time they want to watch a few sequential videos (i.e. episodes) in a row.
While I do think it’s unreasonable to ask devs to implement a feature in their own software that they don’t want, it’s also bull-headed decisions like that that hold back mainstream adoption.
It doesn’t have a dedicated “next file” button like mpc-hc but it’s scriptable, so I added a simple one-liner so that shift+right or shift+left open the next or previous files in the folder, works great :)
On the rant subject, I’m with you. I had the exact same journey on my path to find an mpc-hc replacement. It’s fine for the VLC devs to not accept a request, they’re doing all the work after all. But it’s wild that they dismiss it completely and say there is “no use case” and you should just “make a playlist”
The very fact that lots of people are asking for it is clear evidence that there IS a use-case that’s not covered by existing functionality, or people wouldn’t be asking!
You don’t sit down at the PC and think “Okay I’m going to watch a few episodes, let’s create a playlist!” No - you sit down, double click a file, watch it, and then as the credits roll you think “I want to watch another”
Every streaming service on the planet figured out this is how people want to watch, not to exit back out and go to the menu (or in the OS case the folder) to find the next one.
It’s only the difference of a few seconds, but when you’re accustomed to having that functionality, it’s painful when it’s missing.
‘I wrote a script to handle loading videos because nothing already existed with a good UI and the devs of the biggest project in the space insist their way is better than 20 years of their users requesting another way’ is the most Linux thing I’ve ever heard of.
There is a kinda kludge of a workaround with a plugin, but then there’s no way to get plugins to auto-load whenever a video is first loaded, so you still have to go through the menus to create “automatic” folder playlist. And that’s nearly the same amount of friction as making a playlist.
Ugh. As much as I like vlc, I have to agree. Mini rant time.
It absolutely boggles my mind that the vlc devs refuse to implement automatic loading of prev/next tracks in the same folder, a basic feature that pretty much every other major player has, because it’s not their intended use pattern.
This is a convenience feature to save the user selecting tracks and making a playlist every time they want to watch a few sequential videos (i.e. episodes) in a row.
While I do think it’s unreasonable to ask devs to implement a feature in their own software that they don’t want, it’s also bull-headed decisions like that that hold back mainstream adoption.
On Linux I use mpv.
Also switched to it as my player of choice on Mac (and Windows too, when I was still using Windows)
https://mpv.io/
It doesn’t have a dedicated “next file” button like mpc-hc but it’s scriptable, so I added a simple one-liner so that shift+right or shift+left open the next or previous files in the folder, works great :)
On the rant subject, I’m with you. I had the exact same journey on my path to find an mpc-hc replacement. It’s fine for the VLC devs to not accept a request, they’re doing all the work after all. But it’s wild that they dismiss it completely and say there is “no use case” and you should just “make a playlist”
The very fact that lots of people are asking for it is clear evidence that there IS a use-case that’s not covered by existing functionality, or people wouldn’t be asking!
You don’t sit down at the PC and think “Okay I’m going to watch a few episodes, let’s create a playlist!” No - you sit down, double click a file, watch it, and then as the credits roll you think “I want to watch another”
Every streaming service on the planet figured out this is how people want to watch, not to exit back out and go to the menu (or in the OS case the folder) to find the next one.
It’s only the difference of a few seconds, but when you’re accustomed to having that functionality, it’s painful when it’s missing.
‘I wrote a script to handle loading videos because nothing already existed with a good UI and the devs of the biggest project in the space insist their way is better than 20 years of their users requesting another way’ is the most Linux thing I’ve ever heard of.
I don’t mean this in a good way.
That’s honestly probably the play.
There is a kinda kludge of a workaround with a plugin, but then there’s no way to get plugins to auto-load whenever a video is first loaded, so you still have to go through the menus to create “automatic” folder playlist. And that’s nearly the same amount of friction as making a playlist.
Wrote my own with python-vlc, very easy, has all my mouse buttons for controls.
Highly recommend.