M3U8 (UTF-8 M3U Playlist File)

The M3U8 Audio file format

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.

Technical details of M3U8 files

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.

More information about the M3U8 file format

File extension	.m3u8
File category	Audio
Example file	Download example.m3u8 file (0.02 KiB)
Associated programs	Apple iTunes CocoModX Foobar2000 Nullsoft Winamp RealNetworks RealPlayer Cloud Roxio Creator NXT Pro 3 Songbird VideoLAN VLC media player XMMS
Useful links	Find more information about M3U8 here
Developer	N/A