playlist resume

I wrote about this a little bit a while back, wrt mplayer-resume, that I wanted to work on a way to resume playback from a playlist as well using MPlayer. Well, I finally sat down and figured it out last week. For some reason it took me a good while to figure out the logistics of how to do it rather than the coding. I dunno why. Anyway.

I wanted to wait to bump mplayer-resume until after I added something else, and this is gonna be it. Just gotta clean up the code and package it now, and it’ll be ready to go.

Here’s how it works though: the script, like mplayer-resume, acts as a wrapper to mplayer. In fact, everything is pretty much the same except that it saves both the filename along with the position in the playlist.

The problem I was having a hard time figuring out was that I wanted to easily make two options available: resume playback in the current file I’m in (old mplayer-resume functionality), and resume playback in the position in the playlist I’m in. I just finally mapped two keys on my remote, exit and stop, to take care of both of them.

Hitting Exit on my remote will save the playback of the current file and write that to the playlist position file. Then it also saves the seek time where I left off. Hitting Stop will kill the old entry and just add a line to the playlist saved position file that says what the *next* file should be on playback.

Pretty simple when you consider it, but it took me some time to figure out, mostly so that it seemed intuitive. I figured I’d have a hard time getting used to it, and hit stop accidentally and losing my place where I wanted to be, but so far it’s worked out fine. I’m happy with it.

I’m using it for playback of my TV shows, which is pretty much 95% of what I’ve got ripped on my media setup. I have a few movies, but no AC3 output, so I prefer to just stick those in my DVD player. It is the only way I can watch my Region 2 or 4 DVDs though. For TV, it works great, since I generally want to watch them in general succession of episode order. And if I don’t feel like watching a certain episode, you just hit stop and it’ll skip to the next one. Very nice. I suppose I could map a button to go *back* in the playlist if I screw things up accidentally, but I’m kinda running out of buttons to map on my remote. Besides, vague mappings that I’m supposed to remember usually hurt more than help.