News VLC demoes AI-generated subtitles as it hits new milestone of 6 billion downloads

[Admin]

The developers at VideoLAN showcased an early demo of real-time AI-generated subtitles for VLC media player at CES 2025

VLC demoes AI-generated subtitles as it hits new milestone of 6 billion downloads : Read more

 

[Notton]

Well, the good thing is, VLC's UI is so ancient, I think most people will never find a way to turn AI subtitles on. (or off)

 

[Amdlova]

Old and clean ui... it's a good thing...
I don't like tho use high fancy things like the 256 colors...

 

[SocDriver]

VLC has priorities, one of them is not their UI.

 

[JamesJones44]

I haven't looked at the details but this doesn't sound like Gen AI models. It sounds like run of the mill ML generated language models?

 

[Bikki]

we need baked in super resolution now

 

[TJ Hooker]

I think I remember reading VLC will be adding AI-powered upscaling as well (or maybe already have).

 

[mikeebb]

Nice, if CC isn't built in to the stream already. But I'd be far more impressed if VLC could include or at least fully document the procedure for installing BD and 4K support in the first place. Current process is poorly documented, not directly supported by VLC, and hacky/unreliable. At least in my experience. Changing that would be a more significant improvement than just well-done CC.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Yeah, in 2025 one of the best uses for "AI", upscaling videos to a higher resolution with no/minimal loss in quality, should be the priority, not "AI" for closed captioning.

 

[NinoPino]

After SteamOS licensing, this is the second great news today.
Nice start of 2025.

 

[NinoPino]

Yeah, in 2025 one of the best uses for "AI", upscaling videos to a higher resolution with no/minimal loss in quality, should be the priority, not "AI" for closed captioning.

The offline captioning is a good thing to start with.
We hope also in the upscaler, but for me it is significant only if it will works offline.

 

[bit_user]

When someone tries to get me to look at a youtube video, I typically just go to the transcript and skim it, so I don't have to waste time watching the whole video. Based on that experience, I can say that AI-generated subtitles are better than nothing, but woefully inadequate, depending on the type of content. It's great for a first cut and to generate the timing, but then you'd really want to do some hand editing to fix the various errors.

 

[husker]

Yeah, in 2025 one of the best uses for "AI", upscaling videos to a higher resolution with no/minimal loss in quality, should be the priority, not "AI" for closed captioning.

If you don't speak Japanese, then watching an upscaled super-high-resolution video in Japanese doesn't really help. On the other hand, watching a medium resolution video with subtitles in your native language is a really big help.

 

[usertests]

Sounds good, and I do use VLC's "ancient" UI. But I'm wondering less about the NPU, and more about if it needs gigabytes of plugins to accomplish this. I have no idea.