

M3U stands for Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 Uniform Resource Locator, which is a file format for storing playlists. The SMIL format provides a way to define and synchronize video and audio for an interactive experience on a website and is widely used by website designers. This format is commonly used for websites which offer MP3 audio recordings for download. The file extension M3URL is used by MP3 file playlists which are stored in Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language or SMIL format.

UTF-8 is a Unicode Transformation Format in 8-bit which is a variable-width encoding that symbolizes each character in the Unicode set. File extension M3U8 is a format that is used by a variety of media players which support the UTF-8 format. M3U files can appear with additions to the extension such as M3U8 and M3URL. Other types of M3U files can contain audio or video files which are supported by a wide variety of multimedia applications. This type of M3U file references the song location as opposed to actually storing the audio file. M3U files contain song playlists which point to the actual location of the audio file. The format was originally designed for Winamp Media Player and recently is supported by a wide variety of multimedia applications.įiles which contain the M3U extension are a settings file type which is stored in plain text format. M3U is a format created by the Moving Pictures Experts Group which stores playlists for digital multimedia. The file extension M3U is categorized as a playlist file for MP3 songs and recordings which are downloaded from the Internet.
