VLC reaches 6 billion downloads and integrates AI for subtitles | Open source

VLC, our little open source media player favorite has just reached a monumental milestone with more than 6 billion downloads across the world, as announced during CES 2025 in Las Vegas. And as if that wasn’t enough, the VideoLAN team has a major surprise in store for us that risks radically transforming the way we consume video content.

But first, let’s go back in time a little… It all began in 1996 in the corridors of École Centrale Paris, where a group of passionate students simply wanted to broadcast videos on campus. From this student project will be born VideoLANwhich would go on to become one of the most popular media players in the world, loved by hundreds of millions of users.

The recipe for success? A software completely free, without advertisingwhich does not collect any personal data and which reads absolutely everything. From DVD to exotic format video found in the depths of an old hard drive, VLC always comes out with honors.

The big news that is shaking up CES 2025, presented in the Eureka Park pavilion alongside other innovative startups, is the announcement of a feature that will make movie and series fans jump for joy: a system of automatic subtitle generation powered by artificial intelligence.

The principle is simple but terribly effective:

• AI analyzes the audio in your video in real time
• It instantly generates accurate subtitles
• These subtitles can be translated into many languages
• And everything works locally on your machine, no internet connection required

-What makes this innovation particularly remarkable is its 100% local operation. Unlike other solutions which require sending your data to remote servers, VLC therefore remains faithful to its philosophy of respecting privacy, open source AI models running directly on your computer, thus guaranteeing the confidentiality of your content.

According to Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VideoLAN, the number of active VLC users continues to increase, even in the streaming era. This remarkable growth can be explained by several factors:

• The legendary reliability software
• Its ability to read virtually all existing formats
• Complete absence of advertising and data collection
• Regular updates bringing new features
• An active community of developers and users

In short, this demonstration at CES 2025 proves that VideoLAN continues to innovate while remaining faithful to its fundamental values.

An official release date for the auto-captioning feature has yet to be announced, but this milestone of 6 billion downloads is a testament to VLC’s far-reaching impact as the world’s most loved open source media player. Looking forward to testing it anyway!

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