Free online M3U8 to TEXT converter

A text editor, documentation system, or archive may require a playlist with a .txt extension instead of .m3u8. The change preserves the playlist text; it does not download, extract, or convert the referenced audio or video.

What an M3U8 file contains

.m3u8 is the UTF-8 form of the extended M3U playlist format. It is a plain-text file containing media paths or URLs, comments, and optional directives such as #EXTINF; an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) manifest can also contain tags such as #EXT-X-TARGETDURATION and URLs for media segments or another playlist.

Media players, HLS servers, streaming applications, playlist managers, download tools, and web browsers use M3U8 files. The file is a set of instructions or references, not the audio or video itself, so converting it to .txt does not create a playable media file or make remote URLs available offline.

What a TEXT file provides

A .txt file is a generic plain-text container recognized by text editors, document systems, scripts, and archive tools. Saving the playlist as TXT can make its URLs, tags, and metadata easier to inspect, edit, search, or store when the receiving software does not accept the .m3u8 extension.

The contents can remain identical, including comments, tags, ordering, relative paths, and line breaks. The main compatibility change is the filename extension: software that requires an M3U8 filename may no longer identify the TXT file as a playlist.

Convert M3U8 to TXT online

On 101convert.com, use the built-in converter to upload the .m3u8 file, choose TXT or TEXT as the output format, start the conversion, and download the resulting .txt file. No software installation is required. For private manifests, inspect the service's file-handling terms before uploading; URLs can contain access tokens or other sensitive query parameters.

Convert it with a text editor

1. Open the M3U8 file in a plain-text editor such as Notepad, Notepad++, TextEdit in plain-text mode, VS Code, Kate, Gedit, Nano, or Vim. Do not use a word processor that inserts rich-text formatting.
2. Choose File → Save As.
3. Set the filename to something such as playlist.txt, select UTF-8 as the encoding when the editor provides an encoding option, and save.
4. Open the new TXT file in a text editor and verify that tags begin with #, URLs are intact, and no rich-text markup has been added.

On Windows, Notepad can perform this operation directly. On macOS and Linux, TextEdit in plain-text mode and standard text editors provide the same result. Mobile file managers may preview an M3U8 file, but a text editor with an explicit plain-text save function is more reliable for creating a TXT copy.

Use the command line

If the file already contains UTF-8 text and only a TXT copy is needed, copy it without altering the content:

cp playlist.m3u8 playlist.txt

On Windows PowerShell, use:

Copy-Item .\playlist.m3u8 .\playlist.txt

These commands change only the filename. To normalize or convert an incorrectly encoded file, open it in an editor that can explicitly read the source encoding and save it as UTF-8; blindly recoding bytes can corrupt non-ASCII filenames, titles, or URLs.

Compatibility and quality limits

• Renaming .m3u8 to .txt is sufficient when a program only needs readable text, but it can stop media software from recognizing the file as a playlist. Keep the original M3U8 file if it must remain playable.
• Relative URLs still depend on the original base location. Moving the TXT file or serving it from another directory can make those references resolve incorrectly.
• Converting the manifest does not download HLS segments, join them, remove encryption, or preserve a stream for offline playback. A manifest containing expired, private, or tokenized URLs may be unusable later.
• Use a plain-text editor and UTF-8 encoding. Rich-text formatting, accidental line wrapping, altered characters, or removal of lines beginning with # can break a playlist or manifest.