playnext is a small shell script that helps you watch series, listen to podcasts, or basically do anything to a series of files sequentially.
The basic operation is as follows: if /some/directory contains media files, type
playnext /some/directory
and it will play the first media file in the directory and its subdirectories, using mplayer. The next time you run it, it plays the second one, and so on.
After you've once typed /some/directory in full, you can afterwards get by with just a substring of the final directory component, e.g. directory, dir or even d:
playnext dir
As long as this uniquely identifies a previously used directory, it will work.
Instead of mplayer, you can of course use any media player or other tool of your choice, using the -c option.
Caveats:
- All files in the directory are assumed to be media files. If you stumble into the occasional unplayable file, just try again to get the next one.
- Alphabetical ordering, both of files and of directories, is assumed to be the correct one.
playnext's memory lives in ~/.playnextrc, which is a simple plain text file containing, on each line, the file name of the last episode played.
Several options can be specified to ask playnext to do specific things. Run playnext -h for more information.