NPVR support .m3u or xml playlists?

[mdiscenzo]

I did some digging, and it would appear that NPVR (current version) does NOT support playlists for music and/or videos. Can anyone confirm or deny that allegation senator?

[sub]

That is correct. It does not support any form of playlist files. This was one of those very rarely used features used in GBPVR, so I didnt implement it in NPVR. I think you've been the first person to ask about it in the year of NPVR's life.

If your want to post examples of your playlist files, I'll see if I can add support for them in the next release.

[Clanky]

Hi sub

An example of one of my playlist

f:\Music\U - Z\The Verve - Urban Hymns\01 The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony - B.P.flac
f:\Music\A - D\Edwyn Collins - Gorgeous George\02 A Girl Like You.mp3
f:\Music\U - Z\Paul Weller - Stanley Road\08 - Broken Stones.flac
f:\Music\M - P\Manic Street Preachers - Generation Terrorists\02 - Nat West - Barclays - Midlands - Lloyds.flac
f:\Music\M - P\Nickelback - All the right Reasons\11 Rockstar.mp3
f:\Music\M - P\Nirvana - Nevermind\03 - Come As You Are.flac
f:\Music\I - L\Kings Of Leon - Only By The Night (2008)\03 - sex on fire.flac
f:\Music\A - D\AC-DC\ACDC - If You Want Blood You've Got It (Remastered)\If You Want Blood You've Got It [Remastered] - 04 - The Jack.ape
f:\Music\I - L\INXS - Shine Like It Does_ The Anthology (1979-1997) (2 CD)\Shine Like It Does_ The Anthology 1979-1997 (disc 1)\18-INXS - Listen Like Thieves.flac

Its a m3u file that plays in winamp, wmp, foobar, etc

[mdiscenzo]

That is the correct format listed above. Essentially just the path to the file and the file itself. I believe some .m3u formats also support relative paths, but I would imagine absolute would work best for this example. The whole reason I ask is my music library is quite substantial, and it would be nice to not have to support the resource overhead of launching winamp or iTunes on the NPVR box to fill the house with the dulcet sounds of musical geniuses like Abba or Mandy Moore.

Likewise, generating a playlist of 100-200 songs via remote and browsing hundreds (literally) of directories is painfully time-consuming.

But then again, perhaps NPVR could specifically disallow playing Abba and Mandy Moore. Just a thought.

[sub]

Is that all the file contains? All other .m3u files I've seen contain some additional lines. I couldnt remember exactly what those extra lines were though, which is why I wanted some example files (so I know what to ignore etc).

[mdiscenzo]

Here is an example .m3u that was output (I believe) from winamp. You are correct that there is extraneous information included. This is usually ID3 tag info. Some products, however, do not embed this information in the .m3u file as in this attached example. Likewise, there doesn't appear to be an agreed-upon standard format for .m3u files per se. To create my current .m3u files, I export from iTunes an XML playlist, then use a utility (http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/) to convert it into an .m3u file. That export has a comment on the top line (such as #exported via this cool tool...) and then absolute paths and no tag information. This file looks exactly like what was posted by Clanky.

[mdiscenzo]

I would think supporting .m3u files, along with a couple stipulations, would be a useful feature. The stipulations could be:

1. Only use absolute paths (i.e. "c:\mp3\artist\song.mp3")
   
2. Only include one entry per line
   
3. Omit all comments and #EXTINF lines
   

More info on the "Extended M3U format" can be found here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M3U). This is just a thought to make the implementation perhaps a little easier.

[sub]

This patch should support .m3u files, including absolute paths (c:\mp3\test.mp3), relative paths (.\test.mp3), and non-drive-qualified absolute paths (\mp3\test.mp3)

[Clanky]

Thanks sub, that works perfectly

[mdiscenzo]

Well puddles. Doesn't work for me. I'm on 32bit WinXP sp3, not certain if that would make a difference? I get the beautiful error as shown in the attached file. The actual error message is slightly longer than the Bible.