Talk:M3U

Acronym?

Does anyone know what "M3U" actually stands for as an acronym? ~ Irrel 19:28, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

That's an excellent question. I don't know. Putting your question to Google will probably only tell you stuff you already know.

My guess is as good as any, so here goes: maybe "M3" is just "MP3" with the "P" taken out, and maybe "U" stands for "union". Robert Happelberg 19:54, 8 September 2005 (UTC)

M3 is MP3, U is URL (It's the web location where the MP3 can be found.)
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.73.200.130 (talk • contribs) 06:49, January 22, 2006(UTC).

The article previous cited this LockgerGnome article that says "M3U" stands for "MPEG Version 3.0 URL". As far as I can tell, that's at least partially wrong. M3U certainly doesn't refer to MPEG-3, a set of HDTV video codecs. Since Winamp specializes in MP3's, and MP3 itself stands for MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, one would presume it stands for that instead. Maybe that's original research, but it seems pretty obvious. It would be nice to get a reference from winamp.com to back that up, but I don't think the LockerGnome reference is useful. --Interiot 21:44, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

M3U might stand for "MPEG version 3.0 URL" indeed. My speculation is that, before the terminology was fully established, designers of the Layer 1–3 formats would use the terms layer and version interchangeably. In other words, "MPEG version 3.0" may well be an antiquated way to mean MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 before the latter term became canonical. The article MPEG-1 Audio Layer II #History of development from MP2 to MP3 explains layer as a blanket term for "encoding technique". Therefore—why also not version?

Alternatively, the term layer might well have been originally used to distinguish between video and audio "layers" of an MPEG data stream, as in "MPEG-1 audio layer, version 3.0".

Both lines of reasoning give us one more, indirect hint that M3U was not originated by WinAmp, being itself possibly older than the term MP3. It also matches my other finds, which I intend to publish in the main article shortly.

– 6birc (talk) 22:23, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Winamp

This article speaks of Winamp, but Winamp isn't the only Media player that uses M3U files at all. I am wondering how this can be adjusted? Roddyboy 02:32, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Seems bit like an advertisement. Apple iTunes, Microsoft Windows Media Player, WebTeh BSplayer Pro, JetAudio and I believe most PC-DVD players are capable of playing a .m3u file (I have about 6 different PC-DVD players but haven't tested all of them). Dprabon 04:42, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

As it is stated *.m3u was originated by Winamp. It was subsequently used by other programs for playlisting. Therefore one cannot classify it as an advertisement for Winamp
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.177.1.210 (talk) 18:30, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

It is not stated so. Check the references: they say "WinAmp (?)". Moreover I'm about to publish my own findings that prove the opposite. The name M3U is probably older than the name MP3. Therefore perhaps one can classify it as an advertisement for WinAmp.
—6birc (talk) 22:32, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Evidence that Winamp is not the originator of M3U:

1. The claim that M3U "was originally implemented in Winamp" is merely a fossil from the very first edit of this article (in year 2004 by User:Fleminra), at the time when it was only a stub. Since then, it has never been verified by any reference, tested by a Wikipedian nor removed. It thus survived six solid years.

   The nearest thing to a reference that has ever happened is "A survey of playlist formats" by Lucas Gonze (written in 2003, that is before the first edit on M3U in Wikipedia), which states "Winamp (?)" as the originator of this playlist format.

2. The first version of Winamp, "minimalist WinAMP 0.20a", "was released as freeware on 21 April 1997." "Multiple files on the command line or dropped onto its icon were enqueued in the playlist." (Winamp #Initial releases)

   Quite clearly, M3U was not implemented in the first-ever edition of Winamp. But even if it was...

3. ...version 2.0 of WinPlay3, released six months earlier than the above programme (on 30 October 1996), has M3U implemented! :-O. (References—to be released later.)

—6birc (talk) 04:50, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Now there is a ietf draft that refers to this Wikipedia article stating "The M3U Playlist format, originally invented for the Winamp media player". http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-08#ref-M3U 189.34.34.41 (talk) 23:12, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

Cool.  Do we cite it as source and create a circular reference? —138.100.74.81 (talk) 17:17, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for this. I found a reference for M3U's origins in Winplay3 buried in an archive of winamp.com's site. I added it to the article. I will notify the author of the IETF draft so he can delete the Winamp mention. —mjb (talk) 08:01, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

M3U8

The article asks for citation of the M3U8 file format. I am not sure what is a suitable source reference for this, but it is mentioned in the following pages:

• HTTP Streaming Architecture FAQ
• MP3 Playlist File (UTF-8)

There are also a number of discussion forums that make reference to it. The encoding of this 'unicode' version of M3U is UTF-8 without a Byte-order mark (BOM) from what I can see. There is no definitive page on the format but the convention appears to be accepted based on multiple sources (validate with a search engine). --AJ Mas (talk) 04:27, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

M3u with album art/ image

Will M3u have image links added? If so what is the code to add your own images? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.170.59.228 (talk) 02:49, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

ISO Latin-1 and Windows-1252

The article contains paras that say (1) `The file is saved with the "M3U" or "m3u" filename extension, and - if edited in a text editor - must be encoded in the Windows-1252 format in order to be understood by media players,' and (2) `"m3u" files properly use the Latin-1 charset.'

I don't know which is right, but it can't be both Windows-1252 and Latin-1 (Sunday name ISO-8859-1). (I'm not a guru, or I could edit the page and my question would go away.)

PS: just to be pedantic, "if edited in a text editor" ... why only if created that way? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wyresider (talk • contribs) 18:04, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

I've noticed that inconsistency (Windows-1252 and Latin-1) too.

I've looked into history and I've found out that was added with this edit with edit summary "crucial info for editing m3u files manually".

What is right here?

About the latest issue, I also think that "if edited in a text editor" is wrong and misleading (It may be right in a sentence like "if you edit in a text editor, you should be careful to save it encoded in ... ", coherently with the edit summary; but the present sentence may be understood as "only when edited in a text editor") . — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.17.130.145 (talk) 20:43, 25 December 2011 (UTC)

Well, technically Windows-1252 is a superset of ISO-8859-1 (excluding control characters), so any text that can be represented in ISO-8859-1 will have the same encoding in Windows-1252.  Anyway, there doesn't seem to be any "official M3U format specification", and probably each vendor has their own interpretation and implementation. —138.100.74.81 (talk) 17:13, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, AFAICT, there has never been a specification for non-Unicode M3U files, so there is no standard for the format, the character encoding, or the media types. It has only been through Apple's HLS efforts that we have standards in the works now, but they are based on what Apple's apps do and what makes sense going forward; there is no acknowledging how non-HLS M3U playlists are/were authored and processed.

The editor who added the Windows-1252 info was just writing how-to advice and trying to make it sound authoritative. There's no certainty about anything being Windows-1252 or Latin-1. The reality is that (a.) a non-HLS app that reads an M3U file typically assumes it is authored in the default non-Unicode codepage of the system the app is running on; and (b.) the character encoding of an M3U file is whatever the author's text editor produced. Historically, if you created an M3U file on Windows, you probably saved it in your system's default "ANSI" codepage. In many localizations of Windows this default happens to be 437, a.k.a. Windows-1252, but not always, and the user can change it (even to 65001, which is UTF-8!), though few ever do. If you created the file on some other OS, who knows.

Anyway, I have removed the offending text altogether, and replaced it with what is hopefully a little better. Finding sources to cite to prove a negative is a bit difficult though. Feel free to hack away at it as needed. —mjb (talk) 07:58, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

How To Create

_{Please tell me if I am making this comment in the right location, this is my first venture into wikipedia interaction (i.e. "long time listener, first time caller")}

I find the "Linux" instructions in the "How To Create" section overly complex, and not so portable

The example combines invocation of 'find' and 'sed'

find . -iname '*' -print | sed -n -E -e 's/.*mp3/&/p' -e 's/.*wav/&/p' -e 's/.*wma/&/p'

The 'find' command specifies to look in current directory, match all file name (ignoring case), and print the results all of those could be just satisfied with a simple 'find', with no parameters:

• If no "path" is given, the local directory is used
• -iname '*' just tells you to find all files, which is the default if you didn't specify any expression
• -print seems superfluous here as well, as 'find' will do that by default

Yes, my issues with the above "find" are somewhat nit-picky, my main beef is with the 'sed' portion:

• The "-E" option to sed is not portable (It is not my "Linux"'s sed, so the rest of my sed comments assume no '-E') ... I assume that it specifies extended regexp (which, as far as I can see, is not called-for in this command)
• The culmination of all the '-e' expressions seems to WANT to filter just the files with the right extensions, but it will in-fact match all files with these anywhere in the name (including "nicewaves.png" & "howto.mp3.txt"). Using a "$" at the end of the match would go a long way to remove the wrong files.

The safer, more portable alternative would be to use "find" the way it was intended, with expressions that actually do the work:

find -iname '*.mp3' -o -iname '*.wav' -o -iname '*.wma'

Where we OR (-o) multiple case-insensitive matches on the file names. Note that here the match syntax is a matching pattern and not a regexp, making this a bit more obvious to the novice

Please note that I am just commenting here on file-selection for playlists, not on the actual playlist syntax

--Quarternose (talk) 13:47, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Bad Syntax and/or Examples

The examples of extended directives do not match the given syntax.

For example, EXTINF is defined here as:

#EXTINF - extra info - length (seconds), title

or

#EXTINF - extra info - length (seconds), artist '-' title

However, the examples are written as:

#EXTINF:123, Sample artist - Sample title
#EXTINF:321,Example Artist - Example title

etc.

In other words, while the syntax is written as using " - extra info - ", the examples use ":". — Preceding unsigned comment added by G a adams (talk • contribs) 17:23, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

What about #EXTVLCOPT that VLC seems to add?

nt - 75.161.78.59 (talk) 23:37, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

how do you create it with VLC? • Sbmeirow • Talk • 07:40, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Example:

#EXTVLCOPT:start-time=28
video.mp4

Source: "How to Play Certain Sections and Part of Video and Audio in VLC" [1]

I don't know of any method of doing this in VLC without using an extension. I just edit the the m3u file directly in notepad and VLC interprets it correctly.

– unsigned user 23:17, 06 April 2020 (UTC)

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