Select Filename 🎥🅥🅗🅢

When Video Combine renders a video, it hands downstream nodes a VHS_FILENAMES object - a bundle of all the file paths it produced. That's not a string you can hand to another node that wants a plain path. Select Filename bridges that gap: it pulls one filename out of the bundle and returns it as a string. Use it when something later in your graph needs the actual path to the rendered file - an upload node, a custom "send to Discord" node, a post-processing step, a webhook. It's from Kosinkadink's VideoHelperSuite.

It's a small glue node, and that's fine - VideoHelperSuite is full of these little adapters that make the video nodes compose with everything else. Without it, the file path stays trapped inside a VHS-specific object.

How it works

Video Combine often writes more than one file - the final output, plus intermediates like a no-audio version or a first-frame PNG - and the VHS_FILENAMES bundle lists them all in the order they were created. Select Filename indexes into that list and returns the path you point at as a string.

The inputs and outputs that matter

• filenames - the VHS_FILENAMES connection from a Video Combine node.
• index (default -1) - which file to pick. The default -1 grabs the most complete output, which is almost always what you want (the final, with-audio video). Positive indexes count from the start of the list.

The single output is Filename, a string path to the chosen file.

How to install it

ComfyUI Manager: search ComfyUI-VideoHelperSuite, install, restart. Or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Kosinkadink/ComfyUI-VideoHelperSuite

then restart. No model downloads.

Common issues & troubleshooting

The path points to a file that doesn't exist. This is the real gotcha, and it's documented: if you also use a Prune Outputs node in the same graph, execution order between the two is undefined - and in practice Prune tends to run first and delete files. Since the VHS_FILENAMES list is immutable, Select Filename can hand you a path Prune already removed. If you need both, be aware the selected file may be gone; select the final output (index -1) that Prune keeps, not an intermediate it deletes.

I wanted the video, I got a PNG. You picked the wrong index. Leave it at -1 for the most complete output; only use positive indexes when you specifically want an intermediate.

Downstream node rejects the input. Confirm the node actually wants a STRING path. Select Filename outputs a plain string - if the consumer expects a different type, that's a mismatch to resolve on the other end.