MAI Load Video (path)

ComfyUI's stock video loading has an opinion about where your files live: inside the input directory. That's fine until it isn't - you have a render on another disk, a path from a script, or you're juggling files that shouldn't be copied around just to peek at them. MAI Load Video is the escape hatch: give it a path - absolute, or relative to the input directory - and it hands back ComfyUI's VIDEO type plus the frame count and fps it actually reports.

It's a small node and it's honest about being one. One input (path, default clip.mp4), three outputs: video, frames, fps. Feed the video into Get Video Components (or the MAI compare/out nodes, which all speak VIDEO) to split it into frames and audio. The frames and fps outputs are useful for wiring lengths downstream without a decode.

Why this exists in the pack

This is part of the MAI video tooling trio that MAI Video Compare and MAI Video Out belong to - the review-and-deliver side of ComfyUI-MAINodes, which is mostly known for the MiniMax-H3 de-roping (Motion Lab) nodes. Once you're comparing six candidate renders or saving finals with sidecars, you keep hitting the same friction: you want a clip in the graph that isn't sitting in ComfyUI/input. This node is that friction removed.

Two details worth knowing. IS_CHANGED keys on the file's mtime, so if you edit or replace the file on disk and re-queue, the node picks up the change instead of serving a stale cached result - that's the kind of thing that silently wastes hours with other loaders. And a missing file raises a clear FileNotFoundError naming the resolved path, which beats a cryptic tensor error three nodes downstream.

Install

It ships with the whole pack - GPL-3.0, by matlowai, no Python dependencies of its own:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/matlowai/ComfyUI-MAINodes

Restart ComfyUI and it shows up under image/minimax/video. That's the entire story; it's a load-by-path node, it does what it says on the tin, and sometimes that's exactly the tool you want.