Load Video Path (Native)

If you've ever tried to matte a real video clip - phone footage, a 4K render, anything longer than a few seconds - you've met ComfyUI's 100 MB browser upload wall. Dragging a clip into the page silently fails or times out, and you're left hunting for a workaround. This node exists to make that problem disappear: give it a file path that's already on the machine running ComfyUI and it opens the video directly, no upload, no copy into ComfyUI's input directory.

What it is

Load Video Path (Native) is a sibling of core ComfyUI's Load Video, but instead of routing the file through the browser it just points at a path on disk. The output is a file-backed native VIDEO - the same type core Load Video returns - which means it feeds straight into SAM2Matting Video Background (Streaming) without ever becoming an IMAGE batch. For a matting workflow that's exactly what you want, because the whole point of the streaming node is to avoid decoding the full clip into RAM.

It has exactly one input:

• video_path - an absolute path, or one relative to the ComfyUI working directory, to a video file on the server. In Docker, use the path inside the container, not an unmounted host path.

How it behaves

The node is about as thin as it gets: it validates that the file exists on the ComfyUI machine and hands back a VIDEO. What's quietly nice is the cache handling - ComfyUI invalidates the cached output when the file's modification time or size changes, so if you re-export the clip, rerun the workflow and it actually reprocesses. No stale mattes from a file you edited an hour ago and forgot about.

One honest requirement: it needs a recent ComfyUI with native VIDEO support (the core PyAV-based video plumbing). If your ComfyUI is from before that landed, the node won't have anything to return. And a FileNotFoundError means exactly what it says - the path isn't visible to the process running ComfyUI, which on a Docker setup usually means you mounted the file to the host but forgot to mount it into the container, or you gave it a Windows path while ComfyUI runs in WSL/Linux.

When to reach for it

Use it whenever your clip is too big to upload, or you just don't want to move a 2 GB file through a browser tab. Small files can still use core Load Video; raising ComfyUI's --max-upload-size is possible but unnecessary when this node exists. If you're on the streaming background workflow, this is the loader the README's quick start pairs with it, and it's the one you'll want for anything beyond a test render.

The matching output on the other end is Save Video - the streaming node returns file-backed videos, so wire them straight there. Worth noting the pack is new enough that you won't find much community discussion of it yet; when it breaks, it breaks on paths and container mounts, which are the two things above.