About these M3U tools
M3UPlaylist.net is three browser tools and three guides for the M3U playlist format. It exists because the alternatives ask you to upload a file that frequently contains something private.
Who writes this site
M3UPlaylist.net is published independently. It is not a company portal, not part of a network of look-alike sites, and it has no advertising or sponsorship arrangement with any playlist provider.
Pages are signed with the editorial name rather than a personal one, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight: a byline is only worth something when it points at a real person who can be held to what is written. Until there is a named editor whose background can be stated here, this page will say that plainly instead of inventing credentials. What can be checked in the meantime is the work itself — the guides cite their sources, the tools can be inspected, and corrections are answered at the address below.
How the guides are written
Each guide starts from what the format actually documents and stops where the
documentation stops. Where a rule comes from a specification, the guide links to
it. Where it comes from a convention that players happen to share — the
-1 duration, the tvg-* attributes, the meaning of the
.m3u8 extension — the guide says so, because presenting a
convention as a rule is how people end up with playlists that “should” work.
Statements about behaviour are limited to what can be reproduced. Every structural claim in the format guide is checked against the parser these tools use, and the guide's fault table uses the same wording the validator reports, so a description and a diagnostic cannot drift apart. Where two players are known to disagree, the guide says they disagree rather than picking a winner.
What the tools do with your file
Nothing leaves the tab. The playlist is read with the browser's file API or taken from the textarea, parsed in JavaScript, and written back out as a download the browser generates locally. There is no upload endpoint to send it to.
You do not have to take that on trust. Open the browser's developer tools, switch to the network panel, and use any of the three tools: no request is made while a file is parsed, converted or exported. The same property means the tools keep working after the page has loaded, including offline.
What it is not
It is not a directory of channels and does not link to playlists. It does not check whether a stream is live, because that would mean your browser contacting third-party media servers, and it would turn a private file operation into a network request with your address attached. It does not proxy, restream or redistribute anything, and it has no opinion about where a playlist came from.
That boundary is also why the tools stop where they do. Validating, converting and editing are all operations on text you already have; fetching, testing and playing involve other people's servers, and are a different kind of software with different obligations.
What the site collects
There is no account system, no cookie, no analytics script and no third-party resource on any page. Fonts are the ones already on your system, and the only JavaScript is the parser behind the tools. The site is static HTML, so there is no application server holding a session for you.
Corrections and review dates
If a guide is wrong, or a tool rejects a file it should accept, write to editor@m3uplaylist.net with the smallest example that reproduces it. Playlist edge cases are mostly real files from real providers, and a reproducible case is worth more than a description — it is the difference between a fix and a guess.
Pages are reviewed rather than regenerated. The review date shown on a page changes when that page's content changes, not on a schedule, and it is never backdated. If a correction is substantial, the page is rewritten rather than quietly patched, so the date and the change agree.
The same address reaches a person for anything else about the site, including reports of a broken page or a request to remove something that should not have been published.