FreeCommander Forum

I use the quick panel quite a lot and noticed that it gives an error each time I select a playlist file with the extension .m3u.
The error that is shown (briefly) in the quick view panel is: "A problem occurred in initializing MCI."
The quick view panel remains empty, on the bottom there is a progress bar.
It seems to me that FC does not treat this file as a text file but as an audio file which it tries to play.
When I force the quick view to show the playlist as 'text' then the contents is shown correctly. Tested with playlist files with number of entries from 1 to over 6000.
When I select another playlist file with .m3u extension then the same error appears again.
Have not tested with others types of playlist file extensions. I only use m3u.

In windows I have associated the .m3u extension to winamp. When I double click on the playlist file in FC it opens winamp, all entries are added to the playlist of winamp and winamps starts playing the first entry. So this works ok.

Not sure if this is a bug, but I thought to report it anyway.

Can't confirm with default settings, In viewer settings, multimedia, interface it's WMP 9.0 by default, with this option all files in playlist are played.

When using MCI interface option, I can confirm the issue, MCI probably can't play mu3 playlist, not sure if it's a bug.

With option VLC there is not error, just a black screen, VLC can't play m3u playlists with relative paths, so it's a VLC bug, not FC.

If you want to show m3u as text, in Viewer open Settings - General and remove .m3u from "as Media" field and add .m3u to "as Text" field, or

FC 840 donor, Windows 10 20H2.

Checked my viewer settings and it DOES show Windows Media Player 9.0. The 'auto start playback' option was NOT selected.
I did change the viewer settings so that m3u is now shown as a text file. This works!
I will try it again with the default settings.

Checked with the default settings.

It also shows 'Windows Media Player 9.0'
The viewer still gives error for the m3u file.
I can double click on an m3u file in FC and it will load playlist in winamp and start playing.
When I double click on an mp3 file within FC then it starts playing in winamp.

For me, this is no longer a problem since the m3u file is shown as text from now on.
Maybe the m3u file extension should be AS DEFAULT in the 'as text' line of the viewer options?

Thanks for the tip.