No shuffle, no playlist. What to do? Options

[Caughtus]

I got this thing to play installation videos and commercials in our hardware store. I have a mixture of videos and slides (had to actually change these into videos) that I need to play. Some more often than others. I thought that with a playlist I could develop a play order and mix in the more important ones more often.
But I can't get playlists to work, so I thought I would just make multiple copies of the more important ones and just put it on shuffle.
That doesn't work either.
My last resort would be to manually go in and add a letter in the beginning of each file name, since it plays in alphabetical order.
Can anyone think of another option? I would hate to have to go buy a computer to handle this task.

[hatetea58]

You can make hardlinks of the files, so that you don't need multiple copies on the drive. Put the hardlinks into a folder. Then rename the hardlinks to play in the alphabetical order you want. You can have multiple hardlinks for the same file, each with different names.

There is also a pc utility that can rename the files/hardlinks randomly for you. But once renamed, they will only play in that order until you redo the names from a computer.