The VideoLAN Forums

I have a rather large amount of media files stored on my computer. In this case using Windows. Would like to be able to play the same audio on an Android device. This particularly means playing the same playlists. This led to installing the Android version (3.3.4) of VLC player on a Samsung Tablet for testing purposes. It is fairly simple to attach the Android device to my computer and transfer the audio files (preserving the relative directory structure I might note). Of course it should also be possible to just extract the sd-card and mount it on my computer.

What I haven't been able to figure out is how to transfer a playlist, which are files that I can create and find on Windows. While I think I have figured out what Android VLC calls "Create Playlist" I haven't been able to locate any such files.

What I have been able to do is find some folders structured as follows:

Android/data/org.videolan.vlc/files/medialib/playlists

on the internal storage for the Android device. However there are no files in the sub-folder named "playlists" even though I did create a playlist that is working.

Because these media files may consume large amounts of space I actually have those files stored on a removable sd-card using the same relative folder structure as what is used on my computer. Of course the root folder differs slightly. VLC Player seems quite capable of finding and playing those files but how the playlists are managed is very mysterious at this point. To be honest though I do have relatively little experience using VLC Player.

It is pretty simple to export a playlist file from Windows Media Player using .m3u format if that is (should be) useful. Some mass editing (e.g., changing root folder structure) would also be pretty easy but need to know where to put it on the Android device. If possible it would be better if it could be located with the audio data (i.e., that is how relative folder structures work in other cases).

Some more findings! Up to now I've sort-of thought of a playlist as being synonymous with a file that contains a list of file names for playable tracks. Since I can't find any such files in VLC for Android even when it has working playlists I've come to think that playlists mean something else to VLC for Android.

An experiment was undertaken to see if VLC might treat a playlist file similar to (i.e., substitute for) a file that is an audio track. I placed a playlist file (.m3u format) in my audio library which by the way uses relative directory notation to find the playable tracks. VLC Portable on Windows was able to find and play this file just as expected. In that, a pretty satisfactory approach. When I do the same thing on VLC for Android the playlist shows up on the Playlist Tab but it cannot be played. Getting close but as they say "Still No Cigar".

if your m3u file is in the directory scanned by VLC Android, a playlist should automatically be created. If it has no tracks in it, it's a path issue in the file.

Indeed playlists created from Windows need to be modified before being usable in Android.
Windows uses \ to separate folders, whereas Android - being Linux based - uses /.

In your Windows playlists replace all \ by /. Also save the files in UTF-8 character encoding.
(The path in the playlist also need to be relative).

I have a tutorial - it is in french, you can try to translate it - https://blog.liberetonordi.com/index.ph ... t-playlist