Automatically expanding playlist folders?

[jezztek]

Recent convert from Winamp to VLC but bumping into a problem. My situation: I like having a default playlist of all of my favorite shows on random for background noise. I have all of the shows as separate folders in a master TV folder, but I don't want to play all of them, just my favorites. Also I want the new episodes of these shows I add to their respective folders to be added to the playlist over time (not in real time, but at each restart is just fine). The solution in winamp was easy enough, just create a playlist of folders and winamp would parse all of the folders upon load and add all of the files to the playlist and shuffle away, easy as pie.

However the same type of playlist in VLC doesn't work in this way by default, instead it loads all of the folders as individual items and then once the shuffler selects a folder it expands it to show the underlying files. The problem is lets say for instance I had load small playlist of ten folders like this:

simpsons
seinfeld
community
parks and recreation
[...6 other random shows]

it appears that way as 10 individual folders in the playlist until the first folder is randomly selected, then that folder expands. The issue is that lets say the shuffler picks the simpsons folder as the first pick, that folder expands (currently revealing 541 episodes that each become individual playlist entries) while each of the other shows have just one entry in the playlist. So now in this example I have a playlist of 550 items: 541 Simpsons episodes + 9 show folder entries. Now there's only a 1/60 chance of seeing a non-simpsons show (until it grinds through a ton of episodes).

As a temp solution I just manually expanded all of the folders then saved the playlist as individual files, rather than folders, but now it is static, new episodes that I acquire no longer get added to my playlist on reload, a substantial downgrade from what I had grown accustomed to. So my question: is there any way to force all of the folders to auto-expand when a playlist of folders is loaded?

Thanks!