For questions and discussion that is NOT (I repeat NOT) specific to a certain Operating System.
trueboss926 Blank Cone
Postby trueboss926 » 18 Apr 2017 02:36
Hello, can there be a better way VLC uses to manage playlists? I have all my music stored on a Dropbox folder on my computer, and I use VLC for Windows to create playlists. And then I copy all the songs, including the playlists I created to my Android device. But when i try to open in the VLC app it's telling me the files are not found. Trying to open the m3u file with notepad, I have to manually change the directories for each song to match the filesystem for Android. Every time I add or change a song I have to do this and it's not so convenient, especially if I have to manage a lot of files. If I create or modify a playlist on Windows , I expect it to work on Windows. If I copy that same file to Android without making any changes, I expect it to work on Android also. So can the developers of VLC implement a better solution for this?
dougwong55 New Cone
Postby dougwong55 » 01 Jan 2019 09:35
How do I get VLC to export a playlist with relative paths? I open the files in VLC, arrange them in the order I want and then select Media | Save Playlist to File. I can select a folder and file name for the playlist, but there is no option to choose between absolute paths and relative paths. I am using VLC V3.0.4 Vetinari.
Rémi Denis-Courmont Developer
Contact Rémi Denis-Courmont
Postby Rémi Denis-Courmont » 03 Jan 2019 18:23
Save the playing in the same directory or a parent directory of the files. That's the heuristic to pick relative or absolute paths.
Rémi Denis-Courmont //www.remlab.net/
Private messages soliciting support will be systematically discarded
bikewave55 New Cone
Postby bikewave55 » 14 May 2019 16:54
No, a playlist saved to the same directory as the songs will have absolute path names. Windows 10. V3.0.6 VLC media player. e.g. #EXTM3U #EXTINF:192,Moody Blues, The - Go Now file:///G:/media/music6_1164songs/Moody_Blues__The_-_The_Best_Of_The_Moody_Blues_(1996)_MP3/01%20-%20Go%20Now.mp3
Now, it is true that if you save it to the parent directory, then the paths will be relative to that directory. Which is a step in the right direction. But then the paths will have the directory name in them and if you change the directoryname, then the playlist will not work. This was an odd way to attempt to address this request for feature.
Unknow0059 New Cone
Postby Unknow0059 » 20 Jul 2019 16:41
I am having the same issue as bikewave55 on VLC 3.0.7 Vetinari. I saved an .m3u playlist on Desktop and the path is absolute.
Paths are saved as absolute, except for the paths of the files in the directory the playlist was placed on. If you manually edit the m3u and remove the absolute filepaths leading to the filename, VLC will Not reproduce the playlist, not even the files in the directory of the m3u that were being played prior to editing. Calling this "relative path support" is ridiculous even if partially true.
Return to “General VLC media player Troubleshooting”
Jump to
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 4 guests
When saving a playlist, it's saving an absolute path, it would be much better if this was a relative path. People do not keep their music in stationary locations, and absolute paths make the playlists useless if files are moved to another location. If I load all the tracks from L:\audio\atrist1\album1 into a playlist and save that playlist under L:\audio\artist1\album1 right now the playlist looks like this: #EXTINF:220,Artist1 - Album1 - Song1 L:\Audio\Artist1\Album Folder\Artist1 - Album1 - Song1.mp3 #EXTINF:173,Artist1 - Album1 - Song2 L:\Audio\Artist1\Album Folder\Artist1 - Album1 - Song2.mp3 ... it SHOULD be doing this: #EXTINF:220,Artist1 - Album1 - Song1 Artist1 - Album1 - Song1.mp3 #EXTINF:173,Artist1 - Album1 - Song2 Artist1 - Album1 - Song2.mp3 ... If I save it in the L:\audio\artist1 folder then it should save it like this: #EXTINF:220,Artist1 - Album1 - Song1 Album Folder\Artist1 - Album1 - Song1.mp3 #EXTINF:173,Artist1 - Album1 - Song2 Album Folder\Artist1 - Album1 - Song2.mp3 ... The only time the drive letter should be included is if it's saved on a different drive. This way if copy this entire directory to another computer, or to an external drive or whatever, and then try to play the playlist, it will still work! Absolute paths are NEVER needed, while relative paths are much more useful is all or part of the files are ever relocated. Another reason to stay clear of absolute paths is... Network access.. if you have hard coded drive letters in your playlists, and then you try to open these playlists over a network, then you are just SOL. However if they are RELATIVE paths, then everything is great, and it can find the files and load them. People end up with thousands of playlists, and their music library ALWAYS outlasts their computers and storage medium, remember, the only guarantee with ANY hard drive is that it WILL FAIL.. All hard drives fail, all computers become obsolete, so eventually everything is going to be moved to new computers and new hard drives, and when that happens, none of their absolute playlists are going to work anymore.
Also, when loading a playlist, it would be great if you ignored the delimiter and just use what is needed for the operating system... So if you saved the above playlist on a windows machine then go to play it on a Linux machine, just change the \ to / and everything would load and play just fine.... and if you see a / in windows just use \ instead and everything is fine.
protu New Cone
Postby protu » 15 Aug 2020 13:07
Is it possible to save the VLC Playlist with relative paths and not with absolute paths as it is now, and further to open it with no problem on different machine with similar folder structure ?
For questions and discussion that is NOT (I repeat NOT) specific to a certain Operating System.
Yeshey New Cone
Postby Yeshey » 04 Aug 2019 15:12
Past three days have been hell, I have a folder full of music, a lot of them with special characters, all I want is a playlist with a relative path that can read special characters, and ended up with a giant list of weird VLC behaviour with playlists.. Even have a table to compare Windows with Linux(Kubuntu) and the behaviour seems to be the same. VLC is able to save playlists in 3 formats: .m3u, .m3u8, .xspf; After a lot of testing and scratching my head, it looks like VLC can save playlists with relative paths, but only if they're saved in the parent directory of the folder with the .mp3, like so: ├── Music │ ├── [DnB] - Tristam & Braken - Frame of Mind.mp3 │ ├── [♫] Scratch21 - Sorry Jack.mp3 │ └── Tobu - Life.mp3 ├── playlist(with relative path).m3u8 └── The "weird characters" in these musics is "[" and "]".txt which is good (very weird behaviour, but good) So now I just need a playlist that can handle all of my special characters, and at first, it seemed like all formats could play all types of weird characters, but, eghhhhhh, wrong, this has got to be unintended: (tested in windows and Kubuntu) (1st - )If we right-click a folder with .mp3 and say to play it with VLC, it will play all the music in there in one VLC instance, including the ones with weird characters, if from that instance of VLC we make an m3u or m3u8 playlist, close VLC, and play that playlist with VLC, then it plays all those music with weird characters right! NO matter where we save it! (2nd - )But that seems so be unexampled, if I add another music with weird characters to that playlist and save it again, ON THE FOLDER THat gives it a relative path, that song won't play. As well as if you open a fresh instance of VLC, drag music with weird characters to it, and save an m3u or m3u8 playlist in the respective relative path folder, they won't play. Try it! It seems that when I open it the "1st" way it encodes those weird characters differently than the "2nd" way. If I open them with a text editor, the song "[♫] Scratch21 - Sorry Jack.mp3" in the previous example, encoded as .m3u8 would look like: (1st - )(working way)(encoding:): #EXTM3U #EXTINF:276,[♫] Scratch21 - Sorry Jack.mp3 Music/%5B%E2%99%AB%5D%20Scratch21%20-%20Sorry%20Jack.mp3 (2nd - )(not working way)(encoding:): #EXTM3U #EXTINF:276,[♫] Scratch21 - Sorry Jack.mp3 Music/[%E2%99%AB]%20Scratch21%20-%20Sorry%20Jack.mp3 So the only way to get the relative path with the weird characters is the 1st way, which is not viable for editing & adding music to playlists and stuff. The .xspf format seems to be able to read weird characters, but it never saves with relative paths, and if I manually make it relative, then it stops reading weird characters! Is what I'm looking for even possible? I'm by no means a developer, but the code seems to be all there.. just not right....... Is this some kind of beta stage? Are the playlists being worked on? Should I file a bug report? Multiple bug reports?! Is this supposed to work like this?! It can't... If all else fails can someone suggest me a program that can do this? A program that works on Android, Linux and Windows that can save playlists with relative paths with special characters? Or is my only option to remove all strange characters from all songs... VLC is incredible, and I thought it was perfect... until this happened.. I'm not even sure in which forum should I put this, should I move it to another one please tell me and I shall. Pleading for help,
An average user, who became pro because of this.
Yeshey New Cone
Postby Yeshey » 16 Aug 2019 19:18
Update: (Doesn't seem like I can edit the post.? Is that possible? Am I dumb?)
Anyways, did a bit of a lot more testing and out of my modest sample of musics with weird characters it seems that VLC only fails to encode these two characters in playlists with relative paths: "[" and "]", I was pretty blown away when I took out those two characters from all the music and everything started working. I was about to file a bug report, so I decided to test everything again in the nightly builds (as of 16 August 2019), and, Lo and behold, it's fixed! (at least in Kubuntu) It's fixed! VLC can read & save relative playlists with those 2 characters! Ohh boy.. Good job developers!! If only this fix was in the latest release.. Would have saved me a hell of a lot of headaches
(if anyone read all of this, and got this far, would you reply something? Just one or two words, to know I'm not just shouting into the dark...
gtomorrow New Cone
Postby gtomorrow » 31 Aug 2019 14:30
Just this morning I upgraded to v3.08 (macOS) and VLC still throws an error on my relative-path .m3u playlists containing "#" ("07 - Public Animal #9.flac") and just plain deletes track listings containing "[]" from its playlist ("01 The Beatles - Love Me Do [Single Version].flac"). I've noticed this behavior since the beginning of the 3.x series. v2.x didn't do this; I held off upgrading VLC on my machines just because of this bug. I just now dragged from Finder the two tracks that wouldn't play from their playlists into VLC and they play without problem. What the hell is going on?
Let's both "shout into the dark" together!
Yeshey New Cone
Postby Yeshey » 31 Aug 2019 16:46
Ho-ly Damn.! I swear this was working since VLC 3.08 came out! Just tried it again today and seems to have stopped working! I even have the playlist files that it created a couple days ago when I upgraded VLC and was working with those characters.. now it can't create playlists with the right encoding for them anymore... However... Our shouting hasn't been in vain. I downloaded the latest nightly build, VLC 4.0.0, and (even tho it's slow and very crashy, (and slick btw)) it CAN do everything we have been shouting for! Seriously, it can even read the playlists with the weird encoding VLC creates now and then can't read! (all of this stands only for the playlists when saved in a folder where it gets a relative path) So yeah, the playlists seem to have been at work. It's up to us whether we want to use this very early 4.0.0. VLC, guess I have no choice if I want to keep managing my playlists.
Thanks for joining my miserable whining!
gtomorrow New Cone
Postby gtomorrow » 01 Sep 2019 06:22
It's not miserable whining, it's a legitimate bug that has been introduced in the 3.x series that apparently the VLC developers didn't think important enough to fix immediately.
Rémi Denis-Courmont Developer
Contact Rémi Denis-Courmont
Postby Rémi Denis-Courmont » 01 Sep 2019 16:46
# is the anchor separator. If you have a hash in the file name, it needs to be encoded. As far as I am aware, VLC encodes it correctly if you save a playlist.
Brackets also have special meaning in URL - same solution.
Rémi Denis-Courmont //www.remlab.net/
Private messages soliciting support will be systematically discarded
Yeshey New Cone
Postby Yeshey » 01 Jul 2020 00:56
Just passing by to say that in VLC 3.0.11 this is still an issue, I'm held back from sending a bug report because this seemed to be fixed in VLC 4.0 for what I tested back in the day. But the day VLC 4.0 will arrive still feels so far away
Return to “General VLC media player Troubleshooting”
Jump to
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests