[question] is there a limit to entries for m3u playlist files in mpv?

[masterofobzene]

I'm on windows 10.

Quick question: Is there a limit to entries for m3u playlist files in mpv? I'm trying to play a playlist with 137253 items and mpv fails to play it, no error shown.

[masterofobzene]

There are times where digital-burocracy becomes pathologic. If you didn't want to answer a simple question, just delete it; making a user fill a 2 pages info template just to make a question is plain idiotic. Give 1 reason why the template was needed for anything in this simple question (no support asked) to justify this, I dare you.

[CounterPillow]

Give 1 reason why the template was needed for anything in this simple question (no support asked) to justify this, I dare you.

Sure, I'll bite.

It appears you are encountering an issue where mpv does not recognise all files in a playlist. To see what's going on, since we are not you on your own computer, we need to know what version of mpv you're using, a sample file, and a log file which would show mpv loading those entries.

Hope that helps, you lazy piece of shit.

[masterofobzene]

No, it didn't. I just wanted to know if MPV has a limit in playlist files with too many files. But you seem to be reading things I didn't wrote and then insult. Way to go, miserable.

Your player can't handle such playlists it seems; while MPC-HC had no problems, still I use features of your player, that is why I wasted my time asking a simple short question. I will find by myself and if it doesn't work, I will switch to something that works.

Go get paid or something, I hope you are being paid to have such a pathological behaviour (I want to think you are being pushed and are under stress to be such a deranged).

[Hrxn]

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/discussions

[MoSal]

@masterofobzene
Is the playlist a simple one, or does it contain stuff like inline data/base64 logos, etc (sometimes nominally referred to as m3u plus)?

[masterofobzene]

Simple one. Every path of every file on each line, no "extras". Made with Mkpl and also hand-made by me using powershell. Both produce the same results. Tried the latest mpv windows build (portable) and it simply crashes to desktop when passing the offending playlist. Its worth saying that if I use my "play this folder" context menu, the whole folder and subfolders (the same files that are in the playlist) play normally but MPV requires almost 1 minute to load the entire thing. Tried absolute and relative paths on the playlist, both had the same result.

I fixed the problem by finding the folder containing the offending file/s by simply moving a bunch of subfolders (filled with the files) and adding them back in smaller batches, then re-creating the playlist and test until the gap got smaller and I found the culprit folder, then did a massive renaming using BRU on the files inside that folder. Not sure what characters trigger this issue. Its not the path limit in windows since checking with another tool, I could see the longest path being 194 characters. Removing only the unicode characters did NOT help either.

MPV seems too picky when it comes to filenames it seems, now I found another huge playlist not working and will repeat the workaround. MPC-HC had no problems playing those.

This is an example line of one playlist redacted for privacy, just to give an idea:

Sxxxxxxxxxx\[xxxxxxxxxx]\xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx_xxxxxxxxx_xxxx -xxxx02 [H265].mp4

PS: replacing spaces with underscores and removing brackets didn't help either.

[masterofobzene]

UPDATE: I think MPV doesn't like "-" in filenames on playlists.

[CounterPillow]

UPDATE: I think MPV doesn't like "-" in filenames on playlists.

Wow would you look at that, something we could've noticed had you filled out the issue template, which you refused to do and then got pissy about.

I just wanted to know if MPV has a limit in playlist files with too many files.

You seem to be under the impression that people have a complete view of the entire software stack. They don't. Someone would actually have to go digging into the code to prove the absence of a thing you hypothesize, which is way more work than reproducing a case in which something doesn't work.

Your player can't handle such playlists it seems; while MPC-HC had no problems, still I use features of your player, that is why I wasted my time asking a simple short question.

The issue tracker is not a forum, it is for reporting issues. (Which is also why it's funny you mentioned things like "If you didn't want to answer a simple question, just delete it", as if that's a function of GitHub issues; no, you can't delete them) Discussions is for questions. And your question, as stated, is not simple: the answer depends on somebody knowing the entirety of mpv's m3u playlist reading code which probably comes from FFmpeg.

[MoSal]

This is an example line of one playlist redacted for privacy, just to give an idea:

Sxxxxxxxxxx\[xxxxxxxxxx]\xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx_xxxxxxxxx_xxxx -xxxx02 [H265].mp4

If your playlist doesn't look something like this:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1, Title 1
PATH1
#EXTINF:-1, Title 2
PATH2
#EXTINF:-1, Title 3
PATH3
#EXTINF:-1, Title 4
PATH4

Then it's not an M3U playlist at all!

It would be really helpful for everyone if you pasted the full content of a playlist that causes problems. Copy and rename stuff if needed to protect your privacy.

You still didn't even give a detailed description of how it fails.
"no error shown" where?
Did you try to run it from a console/terminal?
Because if you did then....

UPDATE: I think MPV doesn't like "-" in filenames on playlists.

^ Because if you did then.... you would probably have noticed that without careful quoting, '-' coming after a space can be parsed as a CLI option, which is maybe what's happening here. Maybe other stuff is happening too. No one can possibly know if you don't provide actual relevant details.

[masterofobzene]

@MoSal
I would think that, if it wasn't because it fails with some random files but not every file, so there is no pattern. I have lots (really a lot) of " -xxxx0X [H265].mp4" files still there and they work. I didn't rename all the files, just the ones that are in the problematic folder (for some reason) that I have to find when this happens; this is at this point looking like random to me.

Again, I asked my simple question, you came to ask for more details, I gave them. I didn't expect support, just to know if MPV had a hardcoded limit for playlist entries.
Not going to publish my playlist and was not expecting to do that and it has around 27000 items to be redacted, I just wanted to know the limits of the software, because as said, other software works fine and that was my quick question. This happened to me more than once, so I thought the software may be having problems to load giant playlists.

Also, regarding the m3u extension: check this. I understand its not necessary to use m3u, I use it because of this. So its basically a DIR /B >playlist.m3u command saved as m3u.

PS: also, quoting the filepaths in the playlist didn't work. Already tried it before asking.
PS2: the "problematic folder" doesn't have weird names or symbols and the path is much shorter than 256.
PS3: I also tried replacing "\" (windows folder separator) to "/", but its the same, and I know now that the "-" character is the culprit but only in certain situations that I can't discriminate.

And if by some reason, this is a tryout to make me step in the stick to be able to lecture me about the importance of your digital burocracy, then cut it here and don't make me waste any more time. I already closed this. At this point, I'm giving you information because you asked and you have the possibility to check if the program is behaving as it should or not; if you are in the "this is normal, its your fault" mindset, then please cut it out here.

Finally, its not cool that the program can interpret "-" as an argument to execute if its inside a playlist, even more, taking into account that most videos/music have "-" characters in them. Also, if that is possible (run arguments from playlists) that could be dangerous too.