M3U8 is a playlist format used by various audio and video playback programs, it contains a path or URL to a media file or folder of media files, along with information about the playlist. This player downloads the video specified in the M3U8 file and plays within your browser. To get started,

• Paste a m3u8 URL into the above input box (skip if pre-filled);
• Click the "Play" button.

HLS stands for HTTP Live Streaming. It's a HTTP-based media streaming communications protocol implemented by Apple Inc. It works by breaking the overall stream into a sequence of small file downloads, each download loading one short chunk of an overall potentially unbounded transport stream.

HLS streams are usually described using M3U8 playlist.