What is an M3U or M3U8 File?

What is an M3U or M3U8 File

M3U8 is the reason why we can listen to songs online and stream movies via the internet. An M3U8 file is a playlist file that is common to the entire audio and video playback application world.

The data can be used by both the audio and video players, and it uses plain text files to describe where the media files are located.

The M3U8 file can use all absolute path, relative path as well as URLs. These files can be used to play a variety of media applications and radio stations. The file includes the list of songs and song locations. The songs are not located in the file, but they just grant access to the media files so that the users can listen to them. M3U8 is stored in the form of plain text format.

The file is flexible enough to play with VLC media player, iTunes, Win amp, and many other players. The M3U8 uses the UTF-8 code. This was initially developed for Apple, to stream the media, but now is universally used by all the devices.

Creating the M3U is very easy. You don’t have to create it from scratch. Just save the media file in the M3U format.

TO CONVERT THE M3U FILE

As already said, this is a simple text file. Thus, it will be difficult to change or convert the file to playable MP3 and MP4 or other formats. So just open the VLC player and then from there open the media and save the playlist to file. Now you can play the media files easily. There is also a free playlist creator that you can use to convert the file. Even though both options are easy, many people prefer using the default player.

TO OPEN THE M3U FILE

This is very easy actually. But many people struggle with it, therefore, I am wording down the ways you can do it. The first thing you need to do is compile all the files you want to play together. And all the files are text-based thus, you will need to download the text converter to change the files. For each file there are two lines in the description, the first line is the name and the second is the address of the file. Whenever the player reads the file, it will read both the names.

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