This is a relevant question at this time. Many people now use streaming. Can do some visual instruction?I agree. As you can read here, the word "streaming" can be very flexible and misleading.
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You do not understand me. I meant Streaming on-demand. Not live !
But after doing a fast research about this, I understand that a m3u/m3u8 file could be a simply a playlist or be an index file which could hold the URL of media segment files. A .m3u8 file is usually used for HTTP live streaming, meanwhile a .m3u is more like an universal playlist. The matter here is that either by having a .m3u or .m3u8 file, pointing to a static MP4 file, is the same thing as playing the MP4 directly (technically speaking), since the source it's still a single file (which doesn't have any segments). You can, however "convert" a single MP4 to media segment files (.ts extension) and then use a index file (.m3u/m3u8 extension), but I don't see the point on doing this, unless you want to stream files over the internet (or you can use VLC like bmartino1 said). Here is a tutorial about doing this (but I don't recommend doing this).
Back to the point, a .m3u/m3u8 file is a simple playlist (a simple text file). So, if you don't want to deal with HFS's templates/macros, you will need to find a program that dynamically generates a .m3u/m3u8 from all the files contained in a folder. Then, it will be easy to make HFS run that app every XX minutes, or every time someone visits your website or folder with videos.
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