mpv Watch Later and Playlist Workflows for Local Libraries

This pair of features is one of the most useful parts of mpv for long videos, lectures, and unfinished movies. Shift plus Q is explicit and reliable, while save-position-on-quit makes resume behavior feel more natural when you simply close the player as part of normal use.

The detail that matters is that resume data is still a file write. If the process is killed or the machine shuts down immediately, mpv may not have time to store the state, so it is worth understanding the difference between graceful quit and sudden termination.

• Use Shift plus Q to quit and store the current playback position.
• Enable save-position-on-quit=yes if you want normal close actions to save position too.
• Keep resume-playback enabled if you want matching files to reopen from the saved point automatically.
• Remember that abrupt termination can skip the save step because mpv needs time to write the state file.

Resume is more pleasant when it restores the parts of state you actually care about and ignores the parts that create surprises. Some people want subtitle track and volume remembered every time, while others only want the time position and prefer everything else to start fresh.

mpv gives you that control directly. Treat the watch later file as a small policy decision, not just a cache, and the behavior will match your habits much more closely.

• Use watch-later-options when you want resume files to store only selected state.
• Remove entries such as sid, volume, or mute if you do not want those values restored automatically.
• Use watch-later-options=start if you only want the playback position and nothing else.
• Set watch-later-dir when you want the resume files stored in a specific location.

By default, watch later files are hashed and not easy to browse manually. The filename writing option fixes that for the select script, which turns resume state into something you can navigate intentionally instead of an invisible background feature.

The tradeoff is privacy. If filenames themselves are sensitive, leaving the option off is the safer choice, so this is one of those rare convenience settings that deserves a deliberate decision.

• Enable write-filename-in-watch-later-config if you want the select script to show meaningful watch later entries.
• Remember that writing filenames can expose privacy sensitive information, which is why the option is disabled by default.
• Use g-w to open the select script for watch later entries once filename writing is enabled.
• Enable save-watch-history and use g-h if you also want a browsable history of watched files.

This workflow is ideal for series folders, recorded lectures, or album style video collections. Instead of reopening files one by one, you can let mpv understand the surrounding directory and move through it with playlist controls.

That turns a pile of local media into a more coherent session. The active playlist chooser is especially helpful when you want to jump intentionally rather than moving through items one at a time.

• Enable autocreate-playlist=filter if you want mpv to build a playlist from neighboring files in the same directory.
• Use > or Enter for the next playlist item and < for the previous one.
• Use Shift plus Home or Shift plus End to jump to the first or last playlist item.
• Use g-p to open the select script for the active playlist.

Playlists are powerful because they can represent a whole session in one file, but they also cross a trust boundary. mpv documents this clearly and expects you to think about where a playlist came from before you relax the safety defaults.

That is easy to manage in practice. Treat your own local playlists as normal working material and treat untrusted external playlists like any other file that could ask the player to do more than you intended.

• Use --playlist=<filename> or the loadlist command when you want to open a saved playlist intentionally.
• mpv applies the same security mechanisms to playlist loading that it uses for direct playlist playback.
• Use load-unsafe-playlists only for sources that you trust.
• Keep local library playlists separate from random downloaded playlists or generated URLs you have not inspected.