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Recover Any Version of your Hudl Sportscode Playlist

27 Aug 2026

5 min Read

Playlist Version History is now live in Hudl Sportscode. Every sync saves a version. See what changed, see who changed it, and restore in one action.

More than one person interacts with a playlist in a typical match week. A lead analyst builds it. A colleague adds drawings. A coach reorders clips. But all it takes is for someone to sync it at the wrong moment, and a version that took two hours to prepare is gone forever.

Most departments handle this the same way. They decide in advance who goes into the file and when. They use message threads to signal when they are done. They keep local copies as personal backups and compare them manually when something looks wrong. The system works, albeit with effort. Until it doesn’t.

Playlist Version History removes the need for that antiquated system. Every time a playlist syncs to Hudl, Hudl Sportscode saves a version automatically. Any of those versions can be previewed or restored. The restore is reversible too.

From Detection to Recovery

In February, Hudl Sportscode introduced a new sync workflow that changed how playlists travel between Sportscode and Hudl.

Playlists began to roundtrip with all their structure intact. Drawings, annotations, slides, audio tracks and video angles were preserved rather than lost or flattened. Drawings stopped being burned permanently into exported video and became editable layers that could be changed after sharing and pulled back into Sportscode for further work.

The sync workflow added something else: conflict detection. When two analysts had each changed a version of the same playlist, Sportscode flagged the divergence and offered a choice. Download the Hudl version alongside yours, upload yours as a new playlist, or overwrite the Hudl version with what you have. No silent merges, and the decision stayed with the analyst.

That solved the question of what happens at the moment a conflict is detected. It did not solve what happens when a playlist has already been overwritten before the conflict was caught, or when the decision between three options produces the wrong outcome and nobody notices until a day later.

Detection is valuable. Recovery is what comes next.

Playlist Version History

Every successful sync to Hudl now saves a snapshot of the playlist at that moment. The snapshot records the date, the time and the name of the analyst who synced. No configuration is required, and no extra step is needed. The snapshots happen as part of the sync that already happens.

Those snapshots are available in the Version History panel in the right-hand sidebar of the playlist window. The list runs in reverse chronological order. The top entry is always the current version.

See what changed

Open any past version and the panel shows a colour-coded view of how it differs from the version immediately before it. Green rows are additions. Orange rows are modifications. Red rows are deletions. Hover over any row for field-level detail.

You can move directly between past versions without returning to the current one first. If you want to compare a version from last Tuesday with one from two Thursdays ago, you navigate straight between them.

The diff view is read-only. Opening a past version does not change anything in the live playlist. It is a view, not a state.

Restore any version

To restore a past version, select it from the history panel and confirm. Sportscode handles the rest.

Before anything is committed, Sportscode downloads any footage associated with that version that is not already on disk. This step ensures the restored playlist will not be in a broken state with references to footage that is not available locally. If a file fails to download, the restore is cancelled. The live playlist remains untouched throughout.

Once all footage is confirmed on disk, the restore commits. The playlist is left unsaved for a final review, so the analyst can inspect what has come back before anything is pushed to Hudl. Saving and syncing completes the restore and creates a new snapshot, which means the state immediately before the restore is preserved in the history. If the wrong version was restored, the restore itself can be undone the same way.

The restore process was designed so that there is no point of no return. Every decision can be reversed.

Built for how teams actually work

The version history model is asynchronous: it does not require multiple analysts to be working at the same time or on the same connection. Each sync is a checkpoint. The history accumulates across a match week as work moves through a department.

A version saved on Monday is still accessible on Friday. A Thursday overwrite does not erase Wednesday's snapshot. An analyst working from a stadium with an unreliable connection syncs when they can, and each sync adds to the record.

There is no setup. The history begins accumulating from the first sync after the update goes live. Playlists that have never been synced before will start building a history from their first upload.

For heads of departments

Performance analysis departments are measured on what they produce for the coaching staff, not on how efficiently they manage file versions. When shared work is overwritten, the cost surfaces as a missed clip, a wrong presentation, or a question from a coach that takes an hour to resolve.

Version History makes the department's shared work auditable. Every sync is timestamped and attributed. If something changes unexpectedly, the panel shows who made the change and when. If the change produced the wrong outcome, it can be undone.

Departments can stop coordinating by hand to protect their work and start using that time for the preparation itself.

Getting started

Playlist Version History is available in Hudl Sportscode for customers with a Gold, Platinum or Diamond Hudl subscription. No update to the application is needed beyond the standard release.

To find it, open any synced playlist and look for the Version History panel in the right-hand sidebar. The history begins with the first sync after the update goes live.

If you are not on Gold or above and want to learn more about access, your Hudl representative can help.

Want to learn more? Get in touch with your Hudl rep.