VLC Media Player gets AI subtitle function

VideoLAN is adding a new function to its open-source VLC media player, which is based on artificial intelligence to coincide with this year's CES. As the non-profit organisation in Las Vegas and online announced, VLC will soon be able to automatically generate subtitles and translate them into over 100 planned languages in real time. To do this, the player uses open source AI models that work locally and do not require a connection to a server.

What hardware requirements the feature needs is not yet clear. There is also no release date yet. The developers want to provide more information in a blog post soon. At the demo at the trade fair stand, the automatic translation could be seen in German, French, Hebrew and Japanese, among other languages.

Apart from this, the video player, which was called VideoLAN Client in its initial phase, is celebrating a whopping six billion downloads this week. Despite the age of streaming services, the number of users is growing steadily. The VLC Media Player was developed by students in 1996 and has been indispensable since its release in February 2001. It scores highly thanks to its immense support for practically all video and audio codecs as well as most operating systems.