The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.
Ok now that’s cool. Since it’s often all doom and gloom here, celebrating good tech is a nice change :)
This is something I’m very much behind. I think firefox is doing something similar if i am not mistaken.
One of my favorite shows is a Japanese tv show called GameCenter CX. Fans create subtitles but its a lot of work. Lately they have been using ai to generate subtitles and while some are a bit messed up, you at least get the idea what is going on and they can work off of that if necessary.
At least VLC had a neat table there
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/9/24339817/vlc-player-automatic-ai-subtitling-translation
Ok now that’s cool. Since it’s often all doom and gloom here, celebrating good tech is a nice change :)
Since VLC is open source, can we expect this AI subtitle generator as a separate product that could be used in, say, jellyfin?
This is something I’m very much behind. I think firefox is doing something similar if i am not mistaken. One of my favorite shows is a Japanese tv show called GameCenter CX. Fans create subtitles but its a lot of work. Lately they have been using ai to generate subtitles and while some are a bit messed up, you at least get the idea what is going on and they can work off of that if necessary.
Firefox has offline translation and image alt-text tagging (for screen readers), but people bitched about it when Mozilla introduced it.
I’m glad people seem broadly receptive of it now that VLC is doing something similar.