The VideoLAN Forums

Hi,

I want to have the recent media listed but only when played from certain folders. It looks as if ticking the "Save recently played items" preference and implementing a regular expression filter should produce what I want but it doesn't seem to and I have not been able to find any information on how to make it work (Yes, I do know what I'm doing with regExps). All my tests seem to show that the behaviour is erratic to say the least.

Does anyone of a source for information on these options or know how to use them? Do they work? Whether or not it is possible to filter on the file path when a file (not a folder) has been played?

Many thanks.

Using VLC windows 1.1.7

qt-recentplay-filter is a normal regexp
It should work when opening files from within VLC.

What is the intended behavior of this filter?
a) Allow only matches to display in the Open Recent Media list
b) Exclude matches from display in the Open Recent Media list
c) Allow only newly opened items that match the filter to be added to the list.
d) Exclude newly opened items that match the filter from being added to the list.
e) Something else

I think it is doing (d), but I've been having difficulty confirming it

d) indeed.

Also using a nightly build of vlc 1.2.0 it seems that only media added using the Media > Open<File, Folder, etc> are added to the Recent Media list.
If vlc plays something that is opened by double clicking on a file whose extension opens vlc by default then that is not added to the Recent Media list.
Is that also the intended behavior?

Intended, I don't know, but that is what the code does. Patches are welcome.

Very old topic, but it was the only one I could find on the subject.

Some extra information I found out while playing with this (and browsing the source):

• The mousover on the gui doesn't explicitly say this (maybe obvious, but still, can't hurt to add): When the 'Filter' regexp matches, the item is excluded, not included.
• The string that is used to match the regexp starts with a scheme (e.g. "file://"). It's a URL/URI rather than a file path. This makes sense, because you can also play media over http, for example.
• Forward slash '/' is used as the directory separator character, so 'Music/Horrible' rather than 'Music\Horrible'. Even on windows (this is a consequence of the string being a url rather than a path).
• Use a caret '^' to match from the beginning of the string, otherwise any occurrence of the filter string will trigger a match. For example, if your filter is 'Music', then all files within a folder named Music will be excluded, but also "Movies/Dad Dancing to Music.avi".

Example: To filter all files from the D:\Music\Horrible path, you can use '^file:///D:/Music/Horrible/', or 'D:/Music/Horrible/', but not '^D:/Music/Horrible/' or 'D:\Music\Horrible\', etc.