Video by linking to another app - hear me out

[Tremaparagon]

I know there have been a couple threads asking about video, but probably there's no serious drive to have native video player support. Still, inspired by the Canvas feature on Spotify, I had a thought:

You know how in file manager you can tap on a video file, and if you've set a default app (let's just say VLC for example from now on), it'll open and play the video, then VLC will close and it will come right back to the file manager? What if for some songs if you had the music video or live video download, you could choose to have that file linked to the song in Poweramp? So that when it's encountered in a playlist (this could be a toggle specific to playlist only or to the song across all lists, IDK what would be the ideal implementation for most users), VLC is opened to show the video - then as it ends we'd return to Poweramp and the list would resume. You could make this only happen when the screen is unlocked/Poweramp is pulled up, otherwise it just plays the song natively.

In the same way visualization adds a flair to screen-on use cases, the intent of this idea is to be next level flair for those cases. I have a dual-screen phone and choose to have Poweramp keep the screen on by default - example scenarios would be cooking with a recipe in one screen and my music on the other. The visualization is nice here - but the Canvas like surprise of seeing video is what I'm going for. Another case is maps on one screen while driving, and the music player in the other - at least for my passengers the random inclusion of some videos on a long trip could be impressive to them!

I know this is a very extraneous feature maybe most would consider silly, but again the file manager approach of popping out for a brief "open with" before returning to the  playlist seems to me more tractable than asking for native video support in the player. Maybe this is a stupid spur of the moment showerthought ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but I'm curious what people think.

[andrewilley]

The problem is that PA is not a File Explorer / Manager app. Its Folders view only shows specific files that it has scanned into its music library and can play natively - including a few video formats for which it can play the audio content. It's not a full view of all of the files in a folder. You would need to have a fully featured folder/file explorer view, which PA does not do.

Andre