Playing all files in a directory with MPlayer for Windows

Question

Using:

mplayer "path\to\media\*.*"

doesn't work with MPlayer for Windows.

How do I play all files in a directory?

Answer 1

A nice way is to make playlists and play by i.e.

  mplayer -loop 0 -playlist album.m3u

If you are in a directory of mp3 files you can pipe them to mplayer. On Windows it would be

 mplayer dir *.mp3.

This will result in mplayer playing all mp3 files in directory. Keyboard controls like next / > are working now as well.

Easiest way to create playlists are by commandline, ie: on MSwindows

DIR *.mp3 /A-D/B/S/ON > playlist.m3u 

will add all files in current and all subfolders to playlist.m3u.

Answer 2

It is now clear there is no option to play a folder in MPlayer. So we have to turn to the OS services.
The choice much depends on your creativity, anyway, for the Command Prompt forfiles is rather standard (and a bit shorter than for):

forfiles /p "path\to\media" /c "mplayer \"@file"

Add /s before /p to recourse subdirs.

Of course, use MPlayer path if its directory is not in the PATH variable.

In Powershell replace \" with 0x22:

forfiles /p "path\to\media" /c "0x22mplayer0x22 0x22@file"

If you prefer something more native:

dir -file -r "path\to\media" | % {mplayer $_.fullname}

To recourse subdirs, use -r near -file.

None of these command is a breeze to type, therefore you might want to wrap them in a batch script.

Answer 3

I am able to use commands to run all MP3 files under a folder as below.

1st line: Add MP3 files to a playlist file (playlist.m3u). 2nd line: Play the playlist file in Windows Media Player.

dir path\to\media /A-D/B/S/ON > playlist.m3u
start "wmplayer" path\to\playlist.m3u