Playlists

A playlist is a saved, ordered sequence of library assets that plays through on its own — one item after another, advancing automatically. Use one when you want a display to keep cycling content unattended: a lobby loop, a product reel between sessions, a slide show behind a panel, or a screen saver that runs when nothing else is on the wall.

A playlist is its own object in your library. It has a name, a thumbnail, and a tile you can drag onto a display, exactly like an image, a video, or a scene.

Beta

Playlists are marked Beta in the app — the Save as Playlist button and the playlist card in the side remote both carry a Beta badge.

Playlists Are No Longer Limited to Folders

Earlier, the only way to get a sequence of content playing was to point a display at a folder: whatever sat directly in that folder played in order, and changing the sequence meant moving files around in your library.

A playlist is now an object in its own right. It holds a list of references to assets, so the assets it plays can live anywhere — different folders, different sections of the library, mixed together in whatever order you want — without being copied or moved. Reorganizing your folders afterwards does not reshuffle the playlist, and the same asset can appear in more than one playlist.

Where Playlists Live

Playlists live in your Asset Library at one.vu.studio/library/uploads — click the Vū Studio icon to go Home → click Asset Library → open Uploads.

A saved playlist appears as a tile in the grid with a play badge over its thumbnail, so you can tell it apart from a plain image or video at a glance. The thumbnail is taken from the first item in the playlist that has one.

Building a Playlist from Assets Anywhere in the Library

1. Open the Asset Library (one.vu.studio/library/uploads — Home → Asset Library) and open any folder of assets.
2. Click Create Playlist at the top of the folder.
3. Select the assets you want in the playlist. You are not limited to the folder you started in — browse or search to other folders and keep selecting, and every asset you pick is added to the playlist you are building.
4. Put the items into the order you want them to play (see Reordering Items below).
5. Name the playlist and save it.

The saved playlist appears as its own tile in your library and can be cast, dragged onto a display, scheduled, or shared in a folder like any other asset.

Saving a Folder as a Playlist

If a folder already holds the content in the order you want, you can snapshot the whole folder in one step:

1. In the Asset Library, select exactly one folder (one.vu.studio/library/uploads — Home → Asset Library).
2. Open the folder actions and click Save as Playlist.
3. If the folder contains items a playlist cannot play, you are asked to confirm — the dialog is titled Some assets won't be included and tells you how many items will be left out. Click through to continue, or cancel and clean up the folder first.
4. A confirmation appears with a View in My Assets link to the new playlist.

Points worth knowing about this shortcut:

• It snapshots the folder's direct assets only. Subfolders and their contents are not included.
• The new playlist is saved as a sibling of the source folder.
• It is a point-in-time snapshot. Adding files to the folder afterwards does not change the saved playlist — re-run Save as Playlist to refresh it.
• Re-running Save as Playlist on the same folder updates that folder's existing playlist in place rather than creating a duplicate.
• Save as Playlist needs owner or editor permission on the folder, and exactly one folder selected.

Reordering Items

A playlist stores an explicit position for every item, and plays them in that order from first to last. Drag an item to a new position to change where it plays; the rest of the list closes up around it. The new order takes effect the next time the playlist starts.

Pointing Multiple Slides and Scenes at One Asset

A playlist stores a reference to each asset, not a copy of the file. So does a scene, and so does a slide in a canvas design. That means several places can point at the same source asset at once:

• the same clip used in two different playlists,
• a background used by a playlist and by a scene,
• a logo or title card that appears on several slides.

When you update that one source asset in the library — replace it, re-upload a corrected version, rename it — every playlist, scene, and slide pointing at it picks up the change. You do not have to hunt down and re-place each copy.

The practical habit this encourages: keep one canonical copy of a recurring asset in the library and reference it everywhere, instead of duplicating it into each folder that needs it. Duplicating (Duplicate or Copy to in the asset's context menu) makes an independent second asset — updating one does not update the other.

tip

If you want a change to propagate, update the existing asset. If you want two versions that can drift apart, duplicate it first.

Playing a Playlist

Click a playlist tile in the library to cast it to the connected player, or drag its tile onto a display in the Display Dashboard (one.vu.studio/dashboard — Home → Display Dashboard).

A playlist is player-wide, in the same way a scene is:

• It takes over the player rather than occupying one layer. Playlists cannot be added as a layer — attempting it reports Playlists cannot be added as layers.
• While a playlist is running, other casts to that player are blocked. Casting something else reports A playlist is running — stop it to cast something else. Stop the playlist first.

If you are working in the dashboard's planning mode, a playlist you place is staged rather than started — the playlist card shows Staged — Go Live to start playing, and playback begins when you go live.

Playlist Controls in the Side Remote

When a playlist is running or staged on the active player, the side remote (the slide-out panel on the right side of the Asset Library or Display Dashboard) replaces the usual per-asset transport controls with a playlist card. It shows the playlist's name, its thumbnail, the number of items, and whether looping is on.

Control	What it does
Play playlist / Pause playlist	Starts or holds auto-advance. Pausing also pauses a video item that is currently on screen.
Stop playlist	Rewinds to the first item and pauses there. It does not end the cast — the playlist stays loaded on the player, and Play playlist resumes from the top.
Loop on / Loop off	With looping on, the playlist restarts at item 1 after the last item. With it off, playback halts on the last item.
Seconds per item	How long each image stays on screen, from 1 to 20 seconds (default 4). The card notes: Images only — videos always play in full.
Volume	Playback volume for the playlist's items.

While a cast is still being resolved, the card shows Starting… and the controls are briefly unavailable.

note

A video item ignores the Seconds per item timer and plays to its end before the playlist advances.

Previewing a Playlist in the Remote Without a Player

You can open a playlist in the side remote and preview it without selecting or connecting a player. Open the playlist from your library and the remote loads it against an offline placeholder display, so you can see the playlist's name, item count, and preview image and step through the controls before any hardware is involved.

This is useful for checking a playlist you have just built — that it holds the items you expect, in the order you expect — from a laptop or phone with no wall in front of you. Connect a player when you actually want the content on a display; see Connecting a Player →.

Using a Playlist as a Slide Show

A playlist is the straightforward way to run a slide show on a display:

1. Build the playlist with the images (and any videos) you want, in presentation order.
2. Cast it to the display.
3. In the side remote, set Seconds per item to how long each slide should hold.
4. Turn Loop on for a sequence that runs continuously, or off for a single pass that stops on the last slide.

Because the playlist stores references, updating a slide in the library updates the running show's source of truth — restart the playlist to pick up the new version.

For a one-off, unsaved run through a folder's contents instead, use Present Mode from the folder's ... menu — see The Library →.

Using a Playlist as a Screen Saver

The screen saver is what a display shows after a period of inactivity when nothing else is playing. Pointing it at a playlist instead of a single image gives you a rotating idle screen rather than a static one.

1. Build and save the playlist you want as the idle content.
2. Set it as the screen saver source for the connected player.
3. Set how long the display waits before the screen saver starts, in Settings → Media Server Settings → Screen Saver → Timeout Duration. See Settings →.

The screen saver ends as soon as there is activity on the player, and the display returns to what it was showing before. Audio is muted while the screen saver is running.

Setting a single asset as the screen saver is done by right-clicking it in the library and choosing Set as Screensaver — that action requires admin access to the connected player. See The Library →.

Item Types and Limits

Items per playlist	Up to 20
Item types that play	Images, videos, web content, text, animated backgrounds, canvas designs
Item types that are excluded	Presentations and documents, PDFs, NDI sources, scenes, experiences, applications, and other playlists

• Attempting to save a folder with more than 20 assets reports that playlists are limited to 20 items and suggests splitting the folder into smaller folders. The folder is rejected outright rather than quietly truncated.
• Attempting to save a folder with nothing playable reports This folder has no assets that can be saved as a playlist.
• Excluded items are left out of the playlist, not converted — the confirmation dialog tells you how many before you commit.

The 20-item cap exists because every item is resolved before playback can begin; keeping playlists short keeps the wait before the first frame short.

If an Item Does Not Play

When a playlist starts, every item is resolved first. Any item that cannot be loaded — it was deleted, you no longer have access to it, or it is not a type a playlist can play — is skipped, and the playlist plays the items that remain. One missing file does not stop the sequence.

If none of the items can be resolved, nothing starts. Check that:

• the assets still exist in the library and were not deleted or moved out of your access,
• the playlist is not made entirely of excluded types (see the table above),
• the player is connected — see Connecting a Player →.

A video whose playback stalls is given a generous grace period and then the playlist advances past it, so a single bad file cannot hold the sequence indefinitely.

Related Pages

• Uploading Media → — getting content into the library and which formats are supported
• The Library → — folders, favorites, Present Mode, splash and screen saver actions
• Scenes → — saved compositions of layers, lighting, and camera settings
• Music & Audio → — adding a soundtrack alongside what a playlist or scene is showing
• Scheduling → — running a playlist automatically at a set time