The VLC media player, an open-source initiative developed by VideoLAN, is set to introduce an innovative artificial intelligence (AI) feature. During the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2025), the team unveiled an AI-powered subtitle capability that can generate subtitles in real-time. This new functionality also includes support for instant translation, allowing for captioning in multiple languages almost instantaneously. The AI aspect of the media player leverages open-source local large language models (LLMs), ensuring that it operates offline. However, specifics regarding the release timeline for this feature have not yet been disclosed.
VLC Introduces AI-Generated Subtitles
The use of AI-generated subtitles has seen a significant rise in recent years. At CES, Samsung presented its Vision AI technology, which can create subtitles in real-time. Additionally, Google has rolled out an Expressive Captions feature for all devices operating on Android 14 or newer in the United States.
In a tweet on X (formerly Twitter), VideoLAN president Jean-Baptiste Kempf demonstrated the new AI feature for VLC and emphasized that the subtitle generation and translation rely on local and open-source AI models.
Open-source AI models are publicly available and can be integrated into software without incurring licensing fees to the developers or parent organizations. Examples of such models include Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, Mixtral 8x22B, and Alibaba’s DeepSeek.
VideoLAN plans to employ these open-source models, although the specific AI model has not been disclosed, to develop the AI-generated subtitles feature within the application itself. This integration means the feature can function locally, eliminating the need for cloud-based support.
While the team has not clarified whether the addition of this feature will alter the basic operational requirements for VLC media player, they did note in a post that, “The goal is to not depend on an expensive cloud operation!”
During the showcase, VideoLAN demonstrated AI-generated subtitles in multiple languages, including English, French, Hebrew, German, and Japanese. Kempf further indicated that the VLC AI feature will ultimately support over 100 languages. As of now, a release date for this capability has yet to be announced.
