How to Create Playlist in VLC Media Player

Sometimes when I am really bored at lunch time, I like to watch some of the videos that I have saved on my hard disk while enjoying my lunch. But for this I have to manually start the videos one after another but touching your notebook computer while having lunch is a disaster waiting to happen – the coffee may spill or food particles can get inside the keyboard crevices.

So I decided to create a bunch of playlists for all my favorite videos. This way, I can just open the playlist in the VLC media player and it will keep playing all the videos from the list sequentially one after another. It is not difficult to create a playlist for your video or audio files. Here is how you can create a playlist in the VLC media player:

1. Launch VLC media player and click on the small playlist icon near the bottom edge (assuming you are not using any skin for VLC). Alternatively, you can also press the hotkey Ctrl+L to open the playlist.
2. As you can expect, playlist will be empty. You can right-click in the playlist area and choose to add files or folder containing your media files.
3. After adding all the video or audio files, select Media → Save playlist to file from the menubar. You can also use the hotkey Ctrl+Y to save the playlist.
4. VLC media player allows you to save the playlist in many formats – XSPF, M3U, M3U8 and HTML. The last format is only for generating an HTML file containing the list of media files and cannot be used to play the media files.

Once you have the playlist file, all you have to do is double-click on this playlist file and it will be opened in your default media player. Now you can sit back and enjoy your videos as they are played back to back.