What is a M3U8 file
M3U8 files are, just like M3U files, playlist files. They can be used by many different media players programs. The formatting of the playlist file is the same as for M3U files, however, M3U8 files use UTF-8, a character encoding standard. This makes M3U8 playlists more suitable to store playlists that contain songs with names written in different languages with different character sets.
There is close to no technical difference between M3U and M3U8 files except for the character encoding used. M3U files may also use UTF-8, but are better known for using different standards. M3U8 explicitly uses UTF-8. The plain text file contain information about the location of songs in a playlist.
Here's a small, but not exhaustive list of programs that can open M3U8 documents:
- Apple iTunes
- CocoModX
- Foobar2000
- Nullsoft Winamp
- RealNetworks RealPlayer Cloud
- Roxio Creator NXT Pro 3
- Songbird
- VideoLAN VLC media player
- XMMS
