The video player is testing a new AI tool to create subtitles in over 100 languages.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37011397

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The popular open-source VLC video player was demonstrated on the floor of CES 2025 with automatic AI subtitling and translation, generated locally and offline in real time. Parent organization VideoLAN shared a video on Tuesday in which president Jean-Baptiste Kempf shows off the new feature, which uses open-source AI models to generate subtitles for videos in several languages.

  • TheRealKuniEnglish
    27•1 month ago

    And yet they turned down having thumbnails for seeking because it would be too resource intensive. 😐

    • @DreamlandLividityEnglish
      15•1 month ago

      I mean, it would. For example Jellyfin implements it, but it does so by extracting the pictures ahead of time and saving them. It takes days to do this for my library.

      • @fishpen0English
        1•30 days ago

        Yeah, I do this for plex as well, and stash. I think if the file already exists in the directory vlc should use it. It’s up to you to generate them. That is exactly how cover art for albums on songs worked in VLC for a decade before they added the feature to pull cover art on the fly.

        • @DreamlandLividityEnglish
          2•29 days ago

          I get what you are saying, but I don’t think there is any standardized format for these trickplay images. The same images from Plex would likely not be usable in Jellyfin without converting the metadata (e.g. to which time in the video an image belongs to). So VLC probably does not have a good way to understand trickplay images not made by VLC.

    • @cley_fayeEnglish
      10•1 month ago

      Video decoding is resource intensive. We’re used to it, we have hardware acceleration for some of it, but spewing something around 52 million pixels every second from a highly compressed data source is not cheap. I’m not sure how both compare, but small LLM models are not that costly to run if you don’t factor their creation in.

      • TheRealKuniEnglish
        1•30 days ago

        All they’d need to do is generate thumbnails for every period on video load. Make that period adjustable. Might take a few extra seconds to load a video. Make it off by default if they’re worried about the performance hit.

        There are other desktop video players that make this work.

    • @serenissiEnglish
      1•1 month ago

      It is useful for internet streams though, not really for local or lan video.