Powershell script to open random video

Question

I was looking for a way to open random video file in my folder which has about 400 videos (20 videos in 20 subfolders).

I found a powershell script and managed it to work, but every time I run it I takes about 12 seconds to open some file, could you think of some way to make it faster?

My random.ps1 script contect is following:

$formats = @("*.avi","*.mkv")
$dir = Split-Path $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
gci "$dir\*" -include $formats -recurse | Get-Random -Count 1 | Invoke-Item

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

It's slow because the script has to find all the names of all the videos before it can pick a random one. Searching for all those files takes time. I can't think of an easy way to get around that.

One thing you could do however is to make a pair of scripts. The first one creates a list of the video files and puts it in a file ("videos.txt"):

$formats = @("*.avi","*.mkv")
$dir = Split-Path $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path
gci "$dir\*" -include $formats -recurse | Set-Content .\videos.txt

And the second script selects a file from videos.txt and plays it:

Get-Content .\videos.txt | Get-Random -Count 1 | Invoke-Item

The first script is slow, but the second one is fast. You could maybe call the first script from Windows Task Scheduler so that videos.txt will be kept up-to-date.