VLC will integrate generative AI into its open-source video player. The most famous French software is preparing an automatic subtitle generator capable of speaking several dozen languages.
It’s not just the tech giants at CES 2025! The (i)cone of free software, VLC, is putting on a show at the major Las Vegas show, with a stand dedicated to celebrating its 6th billion downloads.
To celebrate this symbolic threshold, the VideoLAN association is banking on a new functionality: automatic subtitling of videos, thanks to generative intelligence. The volunteers behind VLC briefly introduced us to this feature.
Automatically subtitle videos locally: the VLC project
At the show, the VLC team is demonstrating an option for live subtitling of videos without a subtitle file (the famous .srt files). The idea is to get rid of one of the oldest problems with media players: the lack of subtitles. Fans of series know that it is not always easy to find a subtitle in the right language. It usually takes several hours for the French-speaking community to release a first version of a .srt, while other languages may never arrive.
Thanks to the Whisper model, which you will need to install on your computer, VLC will soon be able to transcribe a video regardless of its language, then translate it. Free and open source, everything works locally. At the same time, this is the end of desynchronized subtitles, since the AI will synchronize the text in the right place.
As a second step, VideoLAN could use AI to add an ASL (sign language) interpreter in the corner of the video. Another novelty that looks very exciting!
Source: www.numerama.com
