This is news that should be of great interest to fans of films, series or anime in original version. Unless you master the original languages, which is rarely the case for example for anime or kdramas, you generally have to wait for studios or enthusiasts to develop VOST versions. The French team of VideoLAN has another idea in mind: enabling their flagship video playback software, VLCto do all this by himself. Finally with a little help all the same: that of a artificial intelligence.
The idea is very simple: that the AI takes care of automatically generating the subtitles in the desired language, in more than a hundred different languages of the user’s choice. Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of the VideoLAN association, explained during this CES 2025 that the goal is for everything to be directly included in the VLC executable, without the need for a plugin or anything else. Above all, and this is undoubtedly the most important point, this AI will run locally, without any need for an internet connection. The AI will draw its necessary power directly from your configuration, via your processor or your graphics card, details have not yet been communicated.
Those who already have one or both feet in the world of AI no doubt already have in mind everything that new technologies around artificial intelligence have to offer. It is still interesting in this case to discover a local application as close to the basic needs that “everyone” may encounter, such as having to wait for a subtitled version of the new episode of their favorite series to finally be available. , or even complain because we are on the 3rd subtitle file downloaded for our film and each time something goes wrong. With AI, there would therefore be no more waiting or fear of delays or anything else since VideoLAN specifies that it will also be responsible for ensuring the correct synchronization of the display of texts. It will now remain to be seen when the functionality will actually appear in the association’s free software, we hope in the VLC 4.0 version that has been expected for quite a while…
A video was posted online of the presentation on the VideoLAN stand at CES 2025 of this new feature, with Kempf’s magnificent French accent, cocorico for this world-famous player which has just passed the 6 billion downloads mark. The team also specifies in comments to the video that it will be possible to extract the subtitles generated by the AI in a file in srt format if desired, or to generate two simultaneous subtitles for those in learning a language for example (subtitle in original language + native language).
