There are many audio and video players but I prefer to use one tool for many purposes. And so I thought of using ffplay as both audio and video player.
To play a file the command is like this.
ffplay path_to_audio_file.mp3 Fine, but how do I play a list of audio files or a list of videos?
I tried to use:
ffplay *.mp3 but to no avail. It gives me the following error:
Argument 'audiofileB.mp3' provided as input filename, but 'audiofileA.mp3' was already specified. ffplay appears to only support a single input file, so you'll need to use code to loop over a list of input files (and possibly to shuffle them); wildly assuming coreutils (for shuf), perhaps something like:
find musicdir -type f -name "*.mp3" | shuf | while read f; do ffplay -autoexit -- "$f"; done This will of course break horribly if there are spaces or newlines in the filenames.
(My current music player is fairly similar, find ~/music -type f -name "*.mp3" | mpg123 --shuffle -Z --list -)
-autoexit flag seems relevant to that issue. -autoexit solved that issue. Now I have another which can be solved by using -nodisp ... this will disable the visualisation of waveform and similar stuff. This will avoid to create a new window and steal focus from current working application (this was very annoying behavior). would you like to include this option in your answer, as a possible option to solve the annoying behavior. I found from this https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2068478
for f in *.mp3 ; do ffplay -autoexit "$f"; done 
while read f; do ffplay -autoexit -- "$f"; done I found this thread while I was writing an FFplay GUI in Lazarus/FPC. It could already play a dropped file list and skip to next/previous file, but I had to kill the ffmpeg process and create a new one every time. I was trying to add the ability to play a whole file list. The simplest workaround I found to the moment was of course using -autoexit, and creating a playlist file with this Pascal code:
begin AssignFile(tfOut, C_FNAME); try rewrite(tfOut); for i:= 0 to Fichiers.Items.Count - 1 do if Fichiers.Selected[i] then begin writeln(tfOut, 'file ' + #39 + conv(Fichiers.Items[i]) + #39) end; CloseFile(tfOut); except on E: EInOutError do ShowMessage ('File error') end; end; Then reading it this way:
'ffplay -f concat -safe 0 -i flist.txt -autoexit' which is the same syntax I use for concatenating files with FFMPeg.
I'm now searching for a proper way to add a delay if files are image files…
ffplay can use the concat demuxer similar to ffmpeg.
Create a file that lists up the files you want to play:
# list.txt file 'audiofileA.mp3' file 'audiofileB.mp3' Then run ffplay:
ffplay -f concat -i list.txt Other useful options:
-autoexit to make it exit when it's done-loop 0 to loop forever (press q to quit).-safe 0 if the file paths are absolute (or contain other special characters).See the ffmpeg wiki about concat demuxer for more details.
