CES 2025 – VLC exceeds 6 billion downloads and shows its AI subtitles in real time

It probably won't have escaped your notice, but we are at a time when streaming, both video and audio, is dominating. After a prosperous period, historic software, such as Winamptry, sometimes painfully, to find a new place in this industry which is constantly changing. But everything still seems to be fine for VLC. Present at CES 2025, the free and open source video player had a major new feature to show: subtitling and automatic translation of videos using artificial intelligence.

A local solution for subtitling videos

Via a video captured at the Las Vegas tech show this January 8, the president of VLC, Jean-Baptiste Kempf, reveals (with a strong French accent and a hammam-style blur) the capabilities of the new functionality. By using open source AI models locally and offline directly on the user's machine (thus avoiding questions of privacy or consumption of artificial intelligence), the software is able to generate sub- titles on the fly, but also to translate them. More than 100 languages ​​will eventually be supported.

The tool here seems directly integrated into VLC, when previous work on such a tool until now involved a plug-in based on OpenAI voice recognition. However, the firm did not specify when this new functionality would be deployed in the software. For the moment, the CES demo works in particular with English, German, Japanese and even French.

VLC: software that is still doing well

VLC was also very proud to reveal that it had passed the six billion downloads mark. On LinkedInthe company even declares: “The number of active VLC users is growing, even in the era of streaming services. We'll see how much it continues to grow!“

VLC media player

VLC Media Player, the benchmark open source and multi-platform media player. It will allow you to play video files, DVDs and Blu-rays, streaming links, and more.

• Version :
  3.0.21
• Downloads:
  2056
• Release date:
  11/10/2024
• Author :
  VideoLAN
• License:
  Free software
• Categories:
  

  Audio – Multimedia – Video

• Operating system:
  

  Android, Linux, Windows 32-bit – XP/Vista/7/8/10/11, Windows 64-bit – XP/Vista/7/8/10/11, Windows Portable – XP/Vista/7/8/10/11 , iOS iPhone / iPad, macOS