A simple, accessible HTML5 media player.
We wanted a lightweight, accessible and customisable media player that just supports modern browsers. Sure, there are many other players out there but we wanted to keep things simple, using the right elements for the job.
- Accessible - full support for captions and screen readers.
- Lightweight - just 6.4KB minified and gzipped.
- Customisable - make the player look how you want with the markup you want.
- Semantic - uses the right elements.
<input type="range">
for volume and<progress>
for progress and well,<button>
s for buttons. There's no<span>
or<a href="#">
button hacks. - Responsive - as you'd expect these days.
- Audio & Video - support for both formats.
- API - toggle playback, volume, seeking, and more.
- Fullscreen - supports native fullscreen with fallback to "full window" modes.
- No dependencies - written in vanilla JavaScript, no jQuery required.
Oh and yes, it works with Bootstrap.
Check out the changelog
- Playlists (audio and video)
- YouTube and Vimeo support
- Playback speed
- Multiple language captions (with selection) ... and whatever else has been raised in issues
If you have any cool ideas or features, please let me know by creating an issue or of course, forking and sending a pull request.
Check docs/index.html
and docs/dist/docs.js
for an example setup.
Heads up, the example index.html
file needs to be served from a webserver (such as Apache, Nginx, IIS or similar) unless you change the file sources to include http or https. e.g. change //cdn.plyr.io/1.1.10/plyr.js
to https://cdn.plyr.io/1.1.10/plyr.js
If bower is your thang, you can grab Plyr using:
bower install plyr
More info on setting up dependencies can be found in the Bower Docs
The awesome @louisrudner has created an ember component, available by running:
ember addon:install ember-cli-plyr
More info is on npm and GitHub
If you want to use our CDN, you can use the following:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.plyr.io/1.1.10/plyr.css">
<script src="https://cdn.plyr.io/1.1.10/plyr.js"></script>
You can also access the sprite.svg
file at https://cdn.plyr.io/1.1.10/sprite.svg
.
If you want to use the default css, add the plyr.css
file from /dist into your head, or even better use plyr.less
or plyr.sass
file included in /src
in your build to save a request.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="dist/plyr.css">
The SVG sprite for the controls icons is loaded in by AJAX to help with performance. This is best added before the closing </body>
, before any other scripts.
<script>
(function(d,p){
var a=new XMLHttpRequest(),
b=d.body;
a.open("GET",p,!0);
a.send();
a.onload=function(){
var c=d.createElement("div");
c.style.display="none";
c.innerHTML=a.responseText;
b.insertBefore(c,b.childNodes[0])
}
})(document,"dist/sprite.svg");
</script>
More info on SVG sprites here: http://css-tricks.com/svg-sprites-use-better-icon-fonts/ and the AJAX technique here: http://css-tricks.com/ajaxing-svg-sprite/
The only extra markup that's needed to use plyr is a <div>
wrapper. Replace the source, poster and captions with urls for your media.
<div class="player">
<video poster="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/poster.jpg" controls crossorigin>
<!-- Video files -->
<source src="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
<source src="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/movie.webm" type="video/webm">
<!-- Text track file -->
<track kind="captions" label="English captions" src="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/movie_captions_en.vtt" srclang="en" default>
<!-- Fallback for browsers that don't support the <video> element -->
<a href="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/movie.mp4">Download</a>
</video>
</div>
And the same for <audio>
<div class="player">
<audio controls>
<!-- Audio files -->
<source src="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/logistics-96-sample.mp3" type="audio/mp3">
<source src="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/logistics-96-sample.ogg" type="audio/ogg">
<!-- Fallback for browsers that don't support the <audio> element -->
<a href="https://cdn.selz.com/plyr/1.0/logistics-96-sample.mp3">Download</a>
</audio>
</div>
You'll notice the crossorigin
attribute on the example <video>
and <audio>
elements. This is because the media is loaded from another domain. If your media is hosted on another domain, you may need to add this attribute.
More info on CORS here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Access_control_CORS
Much of the behaviour of the player is configurable when initialising the library. Here's an example of a default setup:
<script src="dist/plyr.js"></script>
<script>plyr.setup();</script>
You can pass the following options to the setup method using plyr.setup({...})
.
Option | Type | Default | Description |
---|---|---|---|
enabled |
Boolean | true |
Completely disable Plyr. This would allow you to do a User Agent check or similar to programatically enable or disable Plyr for a certain UA. Example below. |
html |
String | See controls.md |
See controls.md for more info on how the html needs to be structured. |
controls |
Array | ["restart", "rewind", "play", "fast-forward", "current-time", "duration", "mute", "volume", "captions", "fullscreen"] |
Toggle which control elements you would like to display when using the default controls html. If you specify a html option, this is redundant. The default value is to display everything. |
debug |
Boolean | false |
Display debugging information on what Plyr is doing. |
seekTime |
Number | 10 |
The time, in seconds, to seek when a user hits fast forward or rewind. |
volume |
Number | 5 |
A number, between 1 and 10, representing the initial volume of the player. |
click |
Boolean | true |
Click (or tap) will toggle pause/play of a <video> . |
tooltips |
Boolean | false |
Display control labels as tooltips on :hover & :focus (by default, the labels are screen reader only). |
displayDuration |
Boolean | true |
Displays the duration of the media on the "metadataloaded" event (on startup) in the current time display. This will only work if the `preload` attribute is not set to `none` (or is not set at all) and you choose not to display the duration (see controls option). |
selectors |
Object | — | See plyr.js in /src for more info. The only option you might want to change is player which is the hook used for Plyr, the default is .player . |
classes |
Object | — | Similar to above, these are the classes added to the player when state changes occur. |
captions |
Object | — | One property defaultActive which toggles if captions should be on by default. The default value is false . |
fullscreen |
Object | — | Three properties; enabled which toggles if fullscreen should be enabled (if the browser supports it). The default value is true . A fallback property which will enable a full window view for older browsers. The default value is true . A hideControls property which will hide the controls when fullscreen is active and the video is playing, after 1s. The controls reappear on hover of the progress bar (mouse), focusing a child control or pausing the video (by tap/click of video if `click` is `true`). The default value is true . |
storage |
Object | — | Two properties; enabled which toggles if local storage should be enabled (if the browser supports it). The default value is `true`. This enables storing user settings, currently it only stores volume but more will be added later. The second property key is the key used for the local storage. The default is plyr_volume until more settings are stored. |
onSetup |
Function | — | This callback function is called on every new plyr instance created. The context (this ) is the plyr instance itself. |
A plyr
object is added to any element that Plyr is initialised on. You can then control the player by accessing methods in the plyr
object. For example if you wanted to pause Plyr:
document.querySelectorAll(".player")[0].plyr.pause();
Here's a list of the methods supported:
Method | Parameters | Description |
---|---|---|
play() |
— | Plays the media |
pause() |
— | Pauses the media |
restart() |
— | Restarts playback |
rewind(...) |
Number | Rewinds by the provided parameter, in seconds. If no parameter is provided, the default seekInterval is used (10 seconds). |
forward(...) |
Number | Fast forwards by the provided parameter, in seconds. If no parameter is provided, the default seekInterval is used (10 seconds). |
seek(...) |
Number | Seeks the media to the provided parameter, time in seconds. |
setVolume(...) |
Number | Sets the player volume to the provided parameter. The value should be between 0 (muted) and 10 (loudest). If no parameter is provided, the default volume is used (5). Values over 10 are ignored. |
toggleMute() |
— | Toggles mute for the player. |
toggleCaptions() |
— | Toggles whether captions are enabled. |
toggleFullscreen() |
Event | Toggles fullscreen. This can only be initiated by a user gesture due to browser security, i.e. a user event such as click. |
isFullscreen() |
— | Boolean returned if the player is in fullscreen. |
support(...) |
String | Determine if a player supports a certain MIME type. |
source(...) |
String or Array |
Set the media source.
string .source("/path/to/video.mp4") This will set the src attribute on the video or audio element.
array .source([{ src: "/path/to/video.webm", type: "video/webm", ...more attributes... }, { src: "/path/to/video.mp4", type: "video/mp4", ...more attributes... }])` This will inject a child `source` element for every element in the array with the specified attributes. `src` is the only required attribute although adding `type` is recommended as it helps the browser decide which file to download and play. |
poster(...) |
String | Set the poster url. This is supported for the video element only. |
destroy() |
— | Destroys the plyr UI and any media event listeners, effectively restoring to the previous state before setup() was called. |
restore() |
— | Reverses the effects of the destroy() method, restoring the UI and listeners. |
The plyr
object on the player element also contains a media
property which is a reference to the <audio>
or <video>
element within the player which you can use to listen for events. Here's an example:
var media = document.querySelectorAll(".player")[0].plyr.media;
media.addEventListener("playing", function() {
console.log("playing");
});
A complete list of events can be found here: Media Events - W3.org
Fullscreen in Plyr is supported for all browsers that currently support it. If you're using the default CSS, you can also use a "full browser" mode which will use the full browser window by adding the player-fullscreen
class to your container.
Safari | Firefox | Chrome | Opera | IE9 | IE10+ |
✔¹ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | API² | ✔³ |
¹ Mobile Safari on the iPhone forces the native player for <video>
so no useful customisation is possible. <audio>
elements have volume controls disabled.
² Native player used (no support for <progress>
or <input type="range">
) but the API is supported (v1.0.28+)
³ IE10 has no native fullscreen support, fallback can be used (see options)
The enabled
option can be used to disable certain User Agents. For example, if you don't want to use Plyr for smartphones, you could use:
enabled: /Android|webOS|iPhone|iPad|iPod|BlackBerry/i.test(navigator.userAgent)
If a User Agent is disabled but supports <video>
and <audio>
natively, it will use the native player.
Any unsupported browsers will display links to download the media if the correct html is used.
There's an API method for checking support. You can call plyr.supported()
and optionally pass a type to it, e.g. plyr.supported("video")
. It will return an object with two keys; basic
meaning there's basic support for that media type (or both if no type is passed) and full
meaning there's full support for plyr.
If you find anything weird with Plyr, please let us know using the GitHub issues tracker.
Plyr is developed by @sam_potts / sampotts.me with help from the awesome contributors
- The Changelog
- HTML5 Weekly #177
- Responsive Design #149
- Web Design Weekly #174
- Hacker News
- Web Platform Daily
- LayerVault Designer News
- The Treehouse Show #131
Let me know on Twitter I can add you to the above list. It'd be awesome to see how you're using Plyr :-)
Credit to the PayPal HTML5 Video player from which Plyr's caption functionality is ported from:
- PayPal's Accessible HTML5 Video Player
- The icons used in Plyr are Vicons plus some ones I made
- An awesome guide for Plyr in Japanese! by @arayutw
Also these links helped created Plyr: