Windows – Can Windows Media Player create playlists based on folder structure

musicvideowindows 7windows media player

Over the years I've carefully molded my digital media collection into a series of folders that make it easy for me to find what I'm looking for. I recently discovered the awesomeness that is streaming video from Windows 7 Media Player to the PS3 so I can watch it on the big screen without all the hassle of hooking the computer up to the TV. The problem is, I totally lose my carefully crafted folder structure and all my videos become one giant mess again… not cool! As a temporary solution, I've created a few playlists for my favorites (Dexter Season 4, Dexter Season 5, Breaking Bad Season 1, etc.). This is a HUGE pain in the a$$.

So, is there a way to get Windows Media Player (on Windows 7) to maintain some sort of folder structure based on the location of the actual video files? So if I have my videos sorted into folders by show and season, Media Player will pick that up and let me browse it in the same way.

As an alternative answer, I'll accept suggestions for a program that can also stream to PS3 and has this "folder organization" feature.

Best Answer

Don't bother going for complex solutions, think logical steps ;)

Open Windows Media Player (WMP), and also open Windows Explorer. From Windows Explorer, right-click the folder you want to add, then select 'Add to Windows Media Playerlist'. WMP will add all songs in all subdirectories of that folder to a list. You can then save and rename the utitled list. It will be easy for you to later merge folder as you wish.

Why hasn't someone posted this solution before???? beats me?

(note this works for Windows 7, latest WMP version as of 13/01/2011)

Related Solutions

Windows – How to Add New Folders to Be Shared from Windows Media Player 12 via DLNA

I figured this out, for the most part. There are several factors at work here.

You do indeed add new folders by adding them to the Videos Library, which can be done from Windows Explorer or Windows Media player, as described in the question.
The files are indexed after being added to the library. I'm not sure exactly what process does this, but I believe it has something to do with Windows Media Player itself. It sometimes seems to speed the process up if you launch Windows Media Player after adding a new folder to the library.
Many large files will take a while to index and appear as available over the DLNA connection. I do not see anywhere that you can check the status of this, but that would be a great feature for Microsoft to add in the future.
Some DLNA clients appear to cache the list of files from the server and I'm not sure how to force them to manually update the list. This was also causing me to think that no new files were added. I confirmed this caching is happening by taking a server offline. The files still showed up as available.

The answer is, add the folder to the library and wait. How long? No clue. I found it easiest to add a new folder to put a small video file in a folder and then add it to the library. Then I can easily test that the new folder is being indexed for the DLNA server.

Windows – Show all File Types in Windows Media Player (WMP)

For WMP's library to recognize and pick up MKV files, copy/paste the following into Notepad, save it as WMP_MKV.reg, double click this file to add it to the registry, and restart WMP:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv]
"PerceivedType"="video"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mkv]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"Runtime"=dword:00000007

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
"mkv"="video"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mkv]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"Runtime"=dword:00000007

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\MLS\Extensions]
"mkv"="video"

It might be necessary to re-add the existing MKV files in WMP's library if they're already in Other media instead of Videos.

For other file types, you can simply replace all occurrences of mkv in the registry file above with the other file type, and also add the resulting file to the registry.

Related Question

Exclude an specific subfolder on Windows Media Player library