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.
“At the same time we have automatic translation working to translate the subtitles to your own language,” Kempf says, with more than 100 languages planned for support. “What’s important is that this is running on your machine locally, offline, without any cloud services. It runs directly inside the executable.”
VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages!
— VideoLAN (@videolan) January 8, 2025
Demo can be found on our #CES2025 booth in Eureka Park. pic.twitter.com/UVmgT6K4ds
AI-powered subtitling has been under development for some time in the form of a plug-in using OpenAI’s speech recognition system Whisper, but this new demo appears to be built directly into the VLC app and generates translated subtitles in real time. There’s no word on when the feature will roll out.
This week, VideoLAN also celebrated hitting 6 billion downloads, with Kempf boasting, “The number of active users of VLC is actually growing, even in this age of streaming services.”
With CES 2025 still in full swing, we’ll track VideoLAN down on the show floor to see the AI subtitling in action for ourselves.
