Download websites that use Plyr

A media player is one of the few front end components whose exact version you can usually read from outside the site, and that makes Plyr unusually informative for a library of its size.

Our record dates Plyr to 2015 and files it under the MIT license, written in JavaScript, as a thin wrapper around the browser's native audio and video elements. The project's own repository, linked from its home page, is younger than the recorded year, so the date is worth reading as a record rather than a milestone. Instead of reimplementing playback, the library styles the controls, keeps keyboard and screen reader behavior intact, and presents one interface whether the media is a self-hosted file, a YouTube embed or a Vimeo embed. Captions, picture in picture, playback speed and full screen come with it, and there is no dependency on jQuery or a framework, which is why the player turns up on hand-built sites as readily as on managed platforms.

The version picture is where the data gets interesting. Across the sites where a version string is readable we count 81 distinct values, with 3.7.8 recorded across a large part of them. A spread that wide for one small library says less about churn in the project than about how front end dependencies are pinned once, at whatever release was current on the day the site was built, and then left alone. Sites that load the file from a public CDN carry that pin in plain sight, which is what makes the version column usable at all.

Presence says the site treats media as content rather than decoration: a course platform, a podcast page, a product demo, a news site with clips, a portfolio. The choice also says something about priorities, because a lightweight open player gets picked over heavier commercial ones by teams that want control of the markup and care about accessible controls. For a vendor selling video hosting, transcoding, captioning, analytics or advertising, a domain running a self-managed player is a different prospect from one running an embedded platform player, and the two are hard to tell apart without a stack-level dataset.

The count comes with a bias. As of October 2026 we detect Plyr on 12,839 sites, and the ones we see lean toward installations that load the library as a separate file. Where the player is compiled into an application bundle the class names usually survive but the version does not, so the version breakdown describes a subset of the population rather than all of it.

A lookup confirms that one site uses the player. A list supports the questions that follow: how many self-hosted players run releases old enough to matter for a security or accessibility audit, which hosting and CMS combinations the library travels with, and which domains publish enough media to be worth a sales conversation. Filtering by version turns a large domain list into a small and specific one, which is the part a per-domain check cannot do.