You may say, “Subtitles are already available for videos uploaded to YouTube with translation.” But movies that are not uploaded to YouTube, or even shots taken during a touristic trip, are a reason for translation. VLC Player announced that they are working on an automatic translation feature with artificial intelligence. The best part is that it will work on a local machine without the Internet and it is also free.
VLC player is a media player that plays downloaded videos on computers and smart devices, phones, Smart TVs, etc. In the first years it was released, its superiority was this: It was a system that could play and open any type of video, and it was free from the beginning. It supported compression and creation algorithms called codecs, which are little known. Although MP4 and H264 are common formats, there are video formats produced by different systems, although we are not very aware of them.
VLC Player, which has been supported by donations for decades and has been downloaded more than 6 billion (not million), announced at their exhibition stand at the “CES 2025” technology event in Las Vegas that they have made a major revolution in the translation business. Without being connected to the internet, the artificial intelligence system they developed listens to the video and brings the subtitles in the desired language. It even converts the audio with dubbing.
(At the time of writing, automatic AI translation of audio was in the experimental phase on YouTube. VLC is one of the pioneers.)
In their answers to the questions, they also say that this subtitle created by artificial intelligence can be recorded in SRT format.
It is also a big deal when looking at the issue from the perspective of accessibility and the disabled. Hearing impaired people will be able to read the videos they shoot with subtitles automatically.
Regarding the features of the new feature, Kemp said, “The important thing is that it works offline on your machine, without using a cloud service.” At the time of development, the automatic translation function supports over 100 languages.
Tech outlet PC Mag says: “Until now, if the video didn’t have subtitles added to it, VLC users usually had to download a separate file in .srt format. This should help make up for our weaknesses in this area.”
It is not available for download yet. They will announce it on their website. This feature may have been released by the time you read this article.
You can download the current version from the website
https://www.videolan.org/
I think that when this feature arrives, it will be installed automatically once it receives updates.
You can read X’s posts below and follow the developments from X accounts.
https://x.com/videolan/status/1877072497146781946
Click to read the articles in the Artificial Intelligence category on the site.