VLC player demonstrates AI subtitles for videos in real time

CES 2025 demonstrated the popular open-source VLC video player with automatic subtitling and AI-powered translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN released a video on Tuesday in which CEO Jean-Baptiste Kempf demonstrates a novel feature that uses open-source artificial intelligence models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.

“At the same time, we are working on automatically translating subtitles into your language,” Kempf says, with plans to support more than 100 languages. “The important thing is that it runs on your computer locally, offline, without any cloud services. It runs directly in the executable.”

AI-powered captioning has been in the works for some time plug using the OpenAI Whisper speech recognition system, but this novel demo appears to be built directly into the VLC application and generates translated subtitles in real time. There is no information when the feature will be implemented.

With CES 2025 still underway, we’ll track down VideoLAN on the show floor to see AI captioning in action firsthand.