How to smoothly play .m3u8 files in Windows Media Player

Question

Windows Media Player technically plays .m3u8 files, but it stutters between each of the audio segments. As an example, try playing https://s3.amazonaws.com/cnn-assets/app-assets/cnn-lite/liteaudio.m3u8, and there will be a stutter every 10 seconds. Increasing the network buffering in settings doesn't help. I was wondering if there's another setting or some sort of codec that will make WMP play .m3u8 files smoothly. Thanks for any guidance.

Answer 1

M3u files do not contain audio data. They are simply a list of media sources, usually other files, for your player to open... A playlist, in other words.

In this case the m3u file has a list of one or more streaming media servers for your player to connect to and stream audio content directly from the internet.

More than likely any skipping you are experiencing is caused by buffer underruns... Meaning all the audio data the server had so far sent had been played and the player was waiting for more data from the server. This can be caused by a number of things, but these days it's most commonly caused by over burdened streaming media servers. The only thing you can do in that case is see if there is another server in the playlist and try that.

Other things to check is that no one on your home network is downloading anything... Especially not via peer2peer sharing. If you use Wi-Fi, try a wired connection instead. There are countless different internet connectivity issues that could potential be the cause.