Video Playlists

[monk64]

have hundreds (if not thousands) of videos which are not movies or TV shows or bought from iTunes. The vast majority of this are things like programming courses, martial arts instructional videos, etc.

Many of these videos have names like "Lesson 1, Lesson 2, etc." or "Part 1, Part 2, etc."

On my iPod classic, it was trivial to setup playlists in iTunes, sync, and then have the videos neatly categorized and the videos in order.

On iOS...it's a disaster. All the videos are dumped under "Home Movies" and there is no organization at all, except alphabetical. All "Lesson 1" videos followed by all "Lesson 2" and no idea what is what.

Other than super-crude hacks like renaming hundreds of videos so the titles sort a certain way (which is still an inertial scrolling RSI), I'm wondering if there is any effective way to organize video playlists in iOS? I found a few suggestions online that relied on trickery but some of these were "fixed" in later iOS versions. Really all I'm looking for is the ability to pick a set of videos and play them in order, which seems a basic human need...

Any advice appreciated!

 

[IWT]

Good evening, monk64

The free VLC from videolan can create video playlists:

http://www.tomsguide.com/faq/id-2363631/set-playlist-vlc.html
https://aboutdevice.com/vlc-media-player-create-save-playlist/

If it is essential that your playlists are on an iDevice rather than a Mac, there is a version available for that as well: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

I don't know if this helps you at all, but I'm not aware of a way to do what you want other than via VLC.

Ian

 

[monk64]

Thanks IWT. Unfortunately, I don't think VLC is a solution since you can't create playlists on the Mac for sync on iPhone. I'll check but I do think they communicate. Ironically playing videos on Mac is easy - just use iTunes! But there's no video playlists on iDevices.

There is a hack: mark the videos as TV episodes in iTunes (mass-select, cmd-I). Then they appear in the TV app as individual "shows" which are kind of like playlists. You can play with seasons and episode numbers to separate things out. The default sorting probably depends on mp3tags but there are scripting libraries to fix that up. So far this is the best approach I've found.

 

[ferrarr]

You can make video playlists in iTunes, when you select movies, they're called Movie Playlists. They work just like Music Playlists.

 

[monk64]

You can make video playlists in iTunes, when you select movies, they're called Movie Playlists. They work just like Music Playlists.

I think you missed the iPhone context. There are no video playlists on iOS.