CES 2025: VLC Media Player Introduced AI Subtitles and Translation That Work Offline

VLC media player is among the surprise entrants at CES 2025, and the company is demoing a feature that automatically generates subtitles for you. When I see companies launching new AI features, I'm usually skeptical because it has become an overused buzzword—but in this case, it does seem useful.

VideoLAN, the parent organization of VLC media player, says it uses open-source AI models to introduce automatic subtitling to its media player. There are two layers to this: The first is generating subtitles itself, and the second one is translation. In the CES demo, VLC media player can be seen playing a video with subtitles in multiple different languages. At the moment, there is no word on when this feature will be available, but I really like the fact that translation is supported because it'll make videos more accessible to people who don't speak English.

In a video uploaded to X, VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf said the AI subtitle generation feature works completely offline. This is heartening to hear because AI tools have often been criticized for violating your privacy by using your data without consent and for extremely high energy usage at data centers. 

Even though the world has largely adopted streaming services to play videos, there is still a big market for media player apps like VLC media player. VLC media player has crossed 6 billion downloads, according to Kempf. His LinkedIn post reads, "The number of active users of VLC is actually growing, even in this age of streaming services. We’ll see how much it will continue to grow!" There are better-designed alternatives, but VLC media player has retained its place on every computer I've used. It still plays practically any video file I throw at it, and it has lots of hidden features for those who want to dig deeper.