VLC media player, an open source project developed by VideoLAN, has added new artificial intelligence (AI) features. At the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2025), the project showcased an AI-powered subtitle feature that can generate and display subtitles on the fly. This feature also supports real-time translation, allowing you to instantly generate translated captions in multiple languages. The media player’s AI capabilities leverage open source and local large-scale language models (LLMs) and work offline. It is unclear when this feature will be rolled out to users.
VLC gets AI-generated subtitles feature
AI-generated subtitles have recently become popular. Samsung has announced new Vision AI technology for its displays that can generate subtitles in real time. Google previously added the expressive captions feature to all devices running Android 14 or later in the US.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf introduced new AI features in VLC media player, noting that subtitle generation and translation is based on local and open-source AI models. I emphasized.
Open source AI models are models that are available in the public domain and can be used or incorporated into software without paying licensing fees to developers or parent organizations. Examples include Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, Mixtral 8x22B, and Alibaba’s DeepSeek.
VideoLAN uses open-source models like this (the team did not reveal the name of the AI model) locally to add AI-generated subtitles capabilities natively. This functionality is built into the application so it can work locally without the need for cloud support.
The team didn’t say whether there would be a significant increase in the base requirements needed to run VLC media player, but said in the post, “The goal is to not rely on expensive cloud operations!” .
In particular, VideoLAN introduced AI-generated subtitles in English, French, Hebrew, German, and Japanese. Kemp also claimed that VLC’s AI-generated subtitles feature will eventually support over 100 languages. The project has not yet announced a release date for this feature.
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