Serviio

I noticed serviio doesn't play m3u playlist, only parses it. Is there a secret to having it actually play a playlist?

Serviio isn't the player, except for the web based media browser, and I don't know how playlists work there. Someone else can answer that. It just serves the video stream to a player. My Sony Blu-Ray players will play one after the other, regardless if I'm using a playlist or just selected a movie out of a list. I do have about a dozen M3U playlists built, and it works fine. I've never tested it with any other brand, although I'm looking at getting a Samsung player this weekend.

But that's controlled at the player end. My Roku and my Panasonic TV will not play the next in the list. Roku just stops when the video is done, and the Panny just repeats the same movie. In the TV, I can disable the repeat play, but then it just returns to the selection screen and the same movie begins again anyway in a preview window.

Well it shouldn't matter if serviio is the player or not; there is nothing preventing a server from sending items of a playlist to the remote player.

I guess I'm not understanding the question. Serviio does exactly this. But the player itself controls if it will play the list in sequence, or stop at the end of a movie and return to the menu.

There is a Playlists browsing category, if it's what you mean.