Free online M3U editor

Upload the file or paste its contents. Every entry is parsed and laid out in a table you can work in: rename, regroup, reorder, delete. Thousands of channels are handled in a background worker, so the page keeps responding while a large file loads.

Nothing leaves the browser. You edit M3U playlists in your browser in the literal sense: the file is parsed on your own machine and written back out only when you ask for it. The original on disk is never touched.

Names, mostly. A provider export gives you entries like US: News One HD |S1| and a channel list full of those is unreadable at a glance. Renaming is the single change that makes a playlist feel like yours.

After that: groups, because two sources rarely agree on what to call the same category. Then order, so the channels you watch are not at position four hundred. Then deletion, which is usually the largest edit by count and the quickest to make.

Sort by group first. It turns an undifferentiated wall of channels into something with shape, and it makes the duplicates obvious. Filter to narrow further. Then work group by group rather than top to bottom, which is how a forty-thousand-entry file becomes an hour instead of an afternoon.

If the list needs pruning rather than tidying, do that first: the duplicate remover collapses repeats and the playlist cleaner drops entries that no longer answer. Editing what is left is a much smaller job.

It edits the list. Names, groups, logos, order, and which entries survive. What it cannot touch is anything at the other end of an address: a stream that is offline stays offline after the tidiest edit, and renaming a channel does not change what it plays.

That reads as obvious written down, and it is still the most common misunderstanding people arrive with. A playlist is an index. Editing an index reorganises the catalogue, not the shelves.

What comes out is a plain M3U written in UTF-8, with the tags you started with preserved rather than normalised away.

• Durations and titles from #EXTINF are kept as they were, unless you changed them yourself.
• Programme guide attributes such as tvg-id, tvg-logo and group-title survive, which matters when the file is going into software that reads them.
• Attributes this editor does not recognise are carried through rather than dropped. A tag it does not understand is still a tag some player might.
• Free-standing comments do not survive. Anything that was neither an entry nor a recognised tag is lost in the round trip.