CES 2025: VLC Media Player Might Soon Be Able To Generate Subtitles With The Help Of AI

CES 2025: The AI functionality will rely on local and open-source large language models (LLMs), allowing it to work offline.

CES 2025: There has been no official announcement regarding the rollout timeline for this feature.

Source : X/@JulienNavas

CES 2025: Do you remember the time when we used to download movies and subtitles to it differently? We might have put those days in the past now as the OG media player, VLC Media Player, is introducing an innovative AI-powered feature. At the recently held Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2025), the team demonstrated a new AI-driven subtitle function that can automatically generate subtitles in real time. This feature also supports instant translation, enabling captions to be displayed in multiple languages as content is played.

The AI functionality will rely on local and open-source large language models (LLMs), allowing it to work offline. However, there has been no official announcement regarding the rollout timeline for this feature.

VLC Media Player Feature: AI-Generated Subtitles

AI-generated subtitles are becoming more widely adopted. For instance, Samsung recently introduced its Vision AI technology, which offers real-time subtitle generation for displays. Google also integrated an Expressive Captions feature into all devices running Android 14 or later in the United States. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLAN, shared on X (formerly Twitter) that VLC's new subtitle generation and translation capabilities will be powered by local, open-source AI models.

Open-source AI models are freely accessible to the public and can be incorporated into software without the need to pay licensing fees to the developers or the parent company. Examples of such models include Meta's Llama 3.1 405B, Mixtral 8x22B, and Alibaba's DeepSeek. VideoLAN is utilising these open-source models (though the specific AI model has not been disclosed) to implement the AI-generated subtitles feature directly within the VLC media player. Because the feature is integrated locally into the application, it can function offline, without relying on cloud services for support.

VLC team did not address whether it would substantially increase the basic requirements needed to run the media player. In a post, the company said, “The goal is to not depend on an expensive cloud operation!”

Absolutely not! The goal is to not depend on an expensive cloud operation!

— VideoLAN (@videolan) January 9, 2025

VideoLAN demonstrated the AI-generated subtitles feature in several languages, including English, French, Hebrew, German, and Japanese. Jean-Baptiste Kempf also mentioned that, in the future, VLC's subtitle feature will expand to support over 100 languages. However, the project has not yet provided a specific release date for the feature.