The popular open-source media player VLC has reached an important milestone, surpassing the 6 billion download threshold worldwide. At the CES 2025 event, the Video LAN team announced that this free application will soon offer an even more advanced experience to its users thanks to artificial intelligence integration.
With the new feature to be added, the VLC media player will be able to analyse videos in real time, automatically generate subtitles and translate them into different languages. Moreover, this entire process will be carried out through open-source artificial intelligence models running locally on the device.

No internet required

The development team says that the AI-powered subtitling system will not require an internet connection or cloud services to work. Video LAN did not share a date when this feature will be available. Therefore, we do not know in which version we can use this system for the time being.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of Video LAN, said in a LinkedIn post that the number of active users of VLC continues to grow even today, when streaming services are common. Launched in 1996 by students at a French university, the VLC project has grown over the years, supported by a large community.