VLC Media Player Developing Offline AI Subtitles for Real-Time Translation
VLC, the hugely popular open-source media player, is working on an exciting new feature: AI-powered real-time subtitles that work entirely offline.
The non-profit behind VLC, VideoLAN, showcased a demo of this feature at CES 2025, sharing a video on X (formerly Twitter) that highlighted the system in action. Impressively, the feature doesn’t rely on cloud services or an internet connection — it runs fully on local, open-source AI models.
This means VLC users will be able to automatically generate subtitles for videos in over 100 languages, display two languages at the same time, and even save subtitles as SRT files for later use.
In follow-up posts, VideoLAN showed examples of the tool displaying real-time subtitles for comedian Ricky Gervais’ famous Golden Globes 2020 speech in languages like French and Japanese.
While platforms like YouTube and TikTok already offer AI-generated captions, VLC is pushing this capability into the offline world. This is especially useful when watching local videos or DVDs without existing subtitle files — something VLC’s current subtitle download tool can’t always solve if no external subtitles exist.
There’s speculation that VLC may be leveraging OpenAI’s Whisper, a top open-source neural network for speech recognition, but VideoLAN hasn’t confirmed the exact model. One thing they did clarify: they have no plans to shift this to the cloud, saying, “The goal is to not depend on an expensive cloud operation!”
Although there’s no public testing version yet, the feature is expected to roll out with the upcoming VLC 4.0 release. For now, users looking for subtitles will still need to hunt down external SRT or VTT files.