I have files spread over some 50 disks in four servers, so clearly, an ordinary "one share per server" wont do for organization, it just becomes a mess to find stuff.

So, for the old XBMC (which I still run on a bunch of XBoxes), I made a program that is scheduled to run every night, which creates a unified directory structure, where every media file is represented by a playlist which points to the real file. Then, I just set the media root in XBMC to the root of this structure. Simple, neat and effective.

The playlists are of m3u format: smb (anonymized here)://workgroup;user:password@server/share/mov11/mov/series/Incomplete/Series name/1/unchecked/Episode name.avi. The playlists are all containing only one file each.

This has worked nicely for almost a decade, and still works on the XBoxes and for VLC on the PC and Linux machines. However, when I try to play one of the playlists using OpenELEC, it just waits for a second, then goes on like I've never tried to play it. If I browse to the real media file, I can play it perfectly fine, so it's somewhere in the playlist that things go wrong.

Any ideas about what I'm doing wrong or what I need to do to troubleshoot it?