VideoLAN, which is the parent organization of the open-source media player VLC, has recently reached an impressive milestone of 6 billion downloads, along with more than 500 million active users each month. To commemorate this achievement, the company has introduced a new feature for its video player during CES 2025: AI-driven automatic subtitles.
AI Subtitles Demo
Jean Baptiste-Kempf, the President of VideoLAN, showcased a demonstration of this innovative feature in a video posted on X. The AI-generated subtitles are created locally and function completely offline, providing automatic translations in real-time into over 100 languages. This exciting addition appears to utilize Whisper, an open-source neural network created by OpenAI for understanding speech. At this moment, only the demonstration is available, but development for full implementation is already in progress.
Future Rollout
As of now, there has been no announcement regarding when the public will be able to access the AI subtitles and the related translations on the VLC media player. You can download the most recent version of VLC through the link provided.