Load Video (Path) ▶️

Most of the time you load a video in ComfyUI through the core Load Video node and its dropdown of files inside your input folder. Load Video (Path) ▶️ (class VideoPathLoader) is the sibling for every time that dropdown is the wrong tool. Instead of choosing from ComfyUI's curated inputs, you paste any full filesystem path - a clip sitting in your training dataset, a render your script just dropped into /tmp, a file on a second drive - and out comes a real VIDEO you wire into the same sockets a core Load Video output feeds.

The node is about as small as they get. One required input, video_path, a STRING holding the full absolute path to the file (surrounding quotes are tolerated and stripped). One output, video. That's the whole contract, and honestly that simplicity is the appeal.

What makes it trustworthy is the mechanism. The node doesn't try to decode video itself. It hands the path to ComfyUI's own native video machinery and wraps the file in the same VIDEO object core Load Video emits - the author's code comment says so explicitly, and it means anything downstream that accepts a native LoadVideo output (frame decoders, video-to-video samplers, save nodes) works here unchanged. Nothing gets decoded until something downstream actually asks for frames, so loading is cheap. It re-executes when the file's modification time changes, and if the path doesn't resolve you get a clear "Video file not found" error instead of a silent black frame. There's a playable preview on the node itself plus an info line with resolution, frame count, fps, and duration.

So when do you reach for it? Three cases, roughly: img2vid or frame-interpolation work where your reference clips live outside the input folder; any pipeline where the file is chosen dynamically - by another node, a stored workflow value, or an external script - rather than by hand; and wanting one particular video to keep flowing through without maintaining a duplicate copy in input. If all your footage already sits in ComfyUI's input directory, the built-in dropdown is friendlier and this node buys you little. It's a utility, not a hero - the kind of node that sits quiet for weeks and then saves you twenty minutes when it finally matters.

Install it the same way you install any custom node - ComfyUI Manager (search ComfyUI-Get-Random-File), or clone into custom_nodes:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/ChrisColeTech/ComfyUI-Get-Random-File

Then restart ComfyUI. No models to download: the pack's only dependency is imageio-ffmpeg, the same ffmpeg shim ComfyUI itself already carries for native video, so there's usually nothing extra to fetch. One real trap: this loader leans on ComfyUI's newer native-video stack, and the whole CCTech/Files menu lives in one file - if the nodes don't show up after install, update ComfyUI itself (an old build won't register them at all) and restart.

If you see "Video file not found" instead of a preview, that's the path, not the node: give the full absolute path, slashes and all, and don't rely on relative paths resolving against the ComfyUI directory.