About M3UPlayer.app

M3UPlayer.app is a media player and a set of playlist utilities that run in your web browser. You give it an M3U or M3U8 playlist, or a direct HLS, DASH or MP4 address, and it plays. The player is the whole product: there is nothing to install, no account to create, and no upload step.

Alongside it are ten tools for the work that surrounds a playlist. Converting Xtream Codes credentials into an M3U file. Checking whether a stream still answers. Merging two playlists, removing duplicates, stripping channels that no longer resolve, pulling the addresses out as plain text, and inspecting what an HLS manifest actually declares. They run in the browser too, on the same terms as the player.

Everything runs on your device. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation we have not got around to fixing, and it decides most of the answers on this site.

Your playlist is never uploaded. When you open a file or paste an address, the parsing happens in your browser. Playlists, favourites and settings are written to this browser’s local storage on this device. They are not sent to us, because there is no account to attach them to and no server-side store to put them in.

Playback is a direct connection between the source you chose and your browser. No stream passes through our infrastructure: we run no proxy, no relay and no cache for video data.

That design has real costs, and it would be dishonest to list the benefits alone:

• Clearing your browser data deletes your playlists. Export a file for anything you want to keep.
• Your playlists do not follow you to another device.
• A stream whose server refuses cross-origin requests will not play here, because the browser will not permit it. That is a property of the source and not something we can work around. The playback guide covers how to tell that case apart from a stream that is simply dead.

Accounts and a server would remove the first two. We have not added them, because the moment a server holds your playlists there is something to leak, something to be compelled to produce, and something to hand over. There is not.

• No video is hosted here. No streams, recordings or media files are stored on or served from our systems.
• No channels are provided. Every playlist is one you supply. The single exception is a short demo playlist of two public test streams published by Apple in its developer documentation, so the player can be tried without bringing your own. Those are served by Apple, not by us.
• There is no channel directory and no search. We do not index streams, and there is nothing here to browse for something to watch.
• No accounts, and no personal data gathered to build one.

If you arrived looking for channels, this is the wrong site. It is a player, in the same sense that a text editor is not a library. What we can act on is anything published on our own pages, which is what the copyright and takedown policy sets out.

M3UPlayer.app is an independent project, built and maintained without outside funding. It is free to use. There is no paid tier, no trial, and nothing held back behind a sign-up.

We also write up what we learn while building it, because the questions that reach our inbox are mostly the same handful. The guides cover the M3U format line by line, how playback actually fails and how to tell the causes apart, and a set of public test streams you can use to check whether a problem is your playlist or your setup.

Bug reports, corrections and feature requests are welcome, and corrections to the guides especially so. The contact page lists the addresses and says what to include so a playback report can actually be acted on.

Our privacy policy and terms describe the same architecture in the language those documents need.