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[mArnell]

Is there a way to play sequential videofiles in MC16?
Take for example if you have three xvid files for one movie.
It would be nice if the library view only showed one movie and not three.
It would be great to just play that one movie and MC16 automatically jumps to the next file when the first file comes to an end.

[minolotus]

You could stack files: Select the files - right click - stacks - stack. To play them right click on the stacked file - stacks - play stack.

[mArnell]

Thanks but that doesn't really solve the issue. Having multiple instances of the same movie clutters up the library.
A great mediaplayer such as MC16 should have this function built in. It really is a trivial thing.

[glynor]

Thanks but that doesn't really solve the issue. Having multiple instances of the same movie clutters up the library.

Stacks DO solve that problem.  When the Stack is collapsed, it only shows as one entry in your library, and you can apply tags to it as though it is one file.

Unfortunately, Theater View doesn't handle Stacks right now very well, though, so if you use Theater View to browse your library, Stacks probably won't work for you currently (hopefully they will add Stack-Awareness to Theater View and Display View at some point in the future).

The easiest way to solve the problem right now?  Don't have multiple files.  It is trivially simple to mux those three separate files into one MKV using MKVMerge, and it doesn't take long at all to do.  To do this:

0. If you don't have mkvtoolnix, download it from here (the Windows build is way down on the page, grab the installer version).

1. Open up MKVMerge GUI from your start menu.

2. Add the first file from the sequence to the Input files list (either drag-drop the file from MC directly into the Input Files box in mkvmerge, or click the Add button and browse to find it).

3. Click the Append button, and then browse and find the second file in the sequence.  Repeat this until you've added all of the files in the right order.

4. Optionally add a Track Name and Language to the General track options section.  You don't need to do this if you don't want to.

5. Click Start Muxing.  It will create a MKV in with the same name and in the same place as your original source file, with all of the contents of those two or three files "appended" together.  This is pretty quick.  It isn't recompressing the files, it is just taking the existing streams out of the source files, and weaving them together into a new MKV.  Then, you can import this new MKV into MC and delete the original files.

There are a few restrictions to this, but they usually aren't a problem.  From the mkvmerge help document:

Appending a file on the other hand will cause all tracks of the second file to be appended to tracks of a previously added file. That way the contents of those tracks will be played one after the other. You can only concatenate tracks that are of the same kind (video to video tracks etc), have the same codec (e.g. MP3 to MP3 but not MP3 to AC3) and the same parameters (e.g. the sample rate must match).

You can tell an added file from an appended one by looking at its name. Appended files and tracks start with "++>".

[mArnell]

Thanks, I did take a look at stacks and although I don't use Theatre view the stack order keep getting messed up?
It keeps insisting on playing file #3 before file #2? I tried manipulating the stack but I can only change what file is on top?
Is there a way to solve this?

It would have been nice if a regular "just press play" had worked on stacks as well but it seems you have to play the stack through menu selection.
Maybe there's a way to fix this as well?

Like you said, the tools are there but I can't get it to work properly?
Maybe it's a setting thing? I'm a n0ob to MC16 and it can be tricky to find the right options and setting them correctly.

[glynor]

Thanks, I did take a look at stacks and although I don't use Theatre view the stack order keep getting messed up?
It keeps insisting on playing file #3 before file #2? I tried manipulating the stack but I can only change what file is on top?
Is there a way to solve this?

Not really.  It is a pain in the butt.  That's why I'd recommend muxing them to single files instead.  I don't think it particularly cares about the "stack order", only which one is on top.  There is probably a way you can stack them so that you can make sure to get the proper order each time, but this will be "flaky" for combining more than two files.

And no, the Play Stack command is only available via the right-click menu.  Again, you're probably better off simply muxing them into single files.

I had a BUNCH of older movie rips that were ripped in the era when I was still burning stuff off onto CDs.  They were, as was common practice then, XviD compressed and split into multiple 700MB files.  Because of a few unrelated Theater View changes, I actually decided last week to go through and fix them and make them all single files.  I probably had 30 different movies to do.  It literally took me about 2 hours to finish.  It was a pain (and it would have been MUCH faster if you could drag-drop "Append" files into the mkvmerge GUI, rather than having to browse for them), but it wasn't that terrible, and now they're all done.

[mArnell]

I guess I'll take a look at the Muxing thing then...
It's been years since I last did any such work on media files.

[glynor]

I guess I'll take a look at the Muxing thing then...
It's been years since I last did any such work on media files.

It really isn't too bad.  The alternative is to just deal with having the additional files listed in your library.  This works fine, really, and is what I did for years and years.  One way you can "deal" with it with relative ease is to tag them using the [Disc #] field.

The reason I actually fixed mine was because Theater View now only shows a "Watch" button for Movies, which operates like a Play Single button (instead of letting you choose Play All manually).  This means that when you are watching a multi-file movie, when it finishes the first file, it will stop mid-movie and go back to the Theater View listing.  That's exactly what you'd want for single-file movies (you generally wouldn't want it to seamlessly continue to the next, completely unrelated, movie in your library), but it doesn't work well for multi-file movie rips.

I battled them on this change for my TV Shows (because I DO want it to seamlessly continue to the next episode of a particular TV Show, usually), and won a change, but I could see why they wanted to make this change for Movies, so I decided to let that one go and fix my files.  I keep all of my video on hard drives now, never CDs, so it doesn't really make sense to have the multi-file rips anymore anyway.