Organization of playlists of various formats and containing completely different objects that will be played using software players, home players or Smart TV panels is a very convenient form of managing your own collections of multimedia or even selected television channels if you are watching IPTV through an online broadcast. In addition, you can create your own playlists even on some social networks or on the same popular YouTube video hosting. With how to create a playlist of the M3U format, then we’ll try to figure it out.
What is a playlist and standard M3U?
But first, let's figure out what the playlist itself is. In fact, this is the most common list of music and video files, a selection of television channels or links to such objects on the Internet that can be opened in a specific program and played in the specified order, which is initially set in the playlist structure. If we talk about the playlist as a software component, it is a special file in which the established playback order is described. When you open the player, it simply receives an instruction from it regarding what to play and why. There are quite a lot of playlist formats today, however, the M3U standard, which is the most ordinary text file that can be viewed in any text editor, has been and remains the most popular. But when you open it in the players, the list is tied to the player, as it were, but not all the files from the music or video collection available on the computer are played, but only those that are listed.
How to create an M3U playlist in software players?
Now one more, so to speak, digression. The fact is that initially this standard for organizing multimedia collections was introduced only with the advent of the legendary WinAmp software player. At that time, this player allowed not only to organize its own collections, but also edited meta-data in the form of ID3 tags, which are additional (extended) information about the artist, album, release years, etc. Only much later Windows-players systems learned to open such lists in their own player, which in all versions was supplied in a predefined form, but could not create such lists itself. Today, almost all well-known players work with the described formats without problems, and regardless of what types of objects can be present in the playlist.
Now back to how to create an M3U playlist yourself, and as an example, consider the popular AIMP player, which, like two drops of water, initially looked like its famous ancestor - WinAmp.
The simplest method, as it is believed, is the most usually manual addition of files to the player’s playlist by selecting the desired tracks or videos indicating their location on the hard drive.
When the list is ready, you just need to export it with an arbitrary name and select the appropriate M3U format, because by default the player exports playlists in its own format (in fact, like any other player). The same goes for organizing collections of videos or mixed lists, which can consist of music, videos, and multimedia links on the Internet.
Information on editing playlists in players
If you add groups of files to the players, usually in players immediately opens a special additional tool that allows you to insert objects into user-selected positions.
If you need to change the order of the tracks manually, you can simply select the desired track, and then move it to the desired position with the left mouse button pressed.
How to adjust the playlist in Notepad?
How to create a playlist of the M3U format is a little clear. But moving tracks in players, especially if there are a lot of them on the list, can be somewhat inconvenient. In addition, you could move them to another location on the hard drive or even delete them, but they still remain in the list. That is why in playlists, you can use either absolute or relative links indicating the location of an object. Open the playlist file in Notepad and look at its contents. Suppose in the example shown there was a problem finding the second object. In particular, this situation may occur if the file has been moved.
In this situation, instead of the path specified in the playlist, you need to specify the true location of the missing object, which can be copied from the address bar of the "Explorer", and then save the list.
If we talk about how to create a M3U-format playlist for use on the local system, you don’t need to specify the exact paths to the files if both the playlist and the files in the list are in the same folder, because when you open the list, the player will search by itself components present in the playlist, alternately scanning both the main and all sub directories. But when saving the list in another location, you will have to use the full paths.
How to create your own M3U playlist for IPTV?
Similar actions can be performed with lists of television channels. How to create an M3U playlist for IPTV yourself?
In principle, you can use the usual Notepad, enter data on channels that look like shown in the image above, and then save the file by first selecting the UTF-8 encoding and marking “All Files” in the list of formats and then adding the extension M3U through the dot after an arbitrary name is manual.
By and large, if you already have a ready-made playlist downloaded from the Internet that you open, for example, in a VLC player, you can do it even easier by selecting several channels you need, and then selecting the option “Save playlist as ...” and assigning it any name.
To simplify the actions, you can use any simple program for creating and editing channel lists like Simple TV.