iOS automatic video file grouping is a car crash

[swimwithbirds]

What the hell is going on with VLC lately?

The app was completely fine up until a few months ago - then the thumbnails all crapped out in the redesign,

And now half my video files are randomly grouped into auto generated playlists I can't turn off, and there's no way to stop it or remove just the playlists?

Is this some insane kamikaze drive to wreck the app ffs? What the hell is going on?

[Glenn42]

I thought it was just me. Not that I’m glad anyone else is having trouble...but I’m glad it’s not just me.

And advice or a fix?

[mj12124]

A car crash is what is is…

I might add that the videos ending up in Groups based on the oddest assumptions by developers are also (& here is where the crash gets really nasty) NOT searchable by filename. What the heck guys!??!

/S

[cliffthepod]

Yep. It's a mess. The criteria for grouping have lumped many videos with title similarities that really are quite different in the ways I use them. The effect is to hide the files from me. If the authors really think that people are using this software in sufficiently similar ways that file grouping could be useful for some of us, it should AT LEAST be an on/off togglable feature in settings. There is already a Playlist function that worked quite well prior to the update that allowed us to group files in ways that are useful to the particular user. It's now broken too,but that's a matter for a separate post. I suspect that automatic grouping is just a well-intentioned but poorly thought out idea based on an authors' assumptions about how people use their files and would want them grouped. I'd be very happy to see it either turn-offable or gone.

[rsvpaa]

Everything said by cliffthepod, mj12124, and swimwithbirds is exactly right. Here's an example. I have a bunch of files. Some of them come with the pianist's name first, and "Chopin" later in the title. Others come with Chopin first in the title. I want to find a file by scrolling through all the Chopin files I have, but when I do a search, it shows me a small group named "Chopin", plus a few ungrouped files. What I want is not in the individual files, but might be in the group, so I check, but not there. So then I have to look through each group named after all the other pianists in turn, and search within that group to see if it's there. Eventually I might find it in one of the groups. Or I might not, and I'll never know if I missed looking in some group. How crazy is this system? Just turn it off, please!