cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37011397
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.
Finally, some good fucking AI
I was just thinking, this is exactly what AI should be used for. Pattern recognition, full stop.
Yup, and if it isn’t perfect that is ok as long as it is close enough.
Like getting name spellings wrong or mixing homophones is fine because it isn’t trying to be factually accurate.
Problem ist that now people will say that they don’t get to create accurate subtitles because VLC is doing the job for them.
Accessibility might suffer from that, because all subtitles are now just “good enough”
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From experience AI translation is still garbage, specially for languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean , but if it only subtitles in the actual language such creating English subtitles for English then it is probably fine.
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What’s important is that this is running on your machine locally, offline, without any cloud services. It runs directly inside the executable
YES, thank you JB
Justin Bieber?
JB stands for Jean-Baptiste, who is the main maintainer of vlc
Good ol’ Zorg
As long as the models are OpenSource I have no complains
And the data stays local.
This might be one of the few times I’ve seen AI being useful and not just slapped on something for marketing purposes.
And yet they turned down having thumbnails for seeking because it would be too resource intensive. 😐
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.
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.
The technology is nowhere near being good though. On synthetic tests, on the data it was trained and tweeked on, maybe, I don’t know.
I corun an event when we invite speakers from all over the world, and we tried every way to generate subtitles, all of them run on the level of YouTube autogenerated ones. It’s better than nothing, but you can’t rely on it really.is your goal to rely on it, or to have it as a backup?
For my purpose of having backup nearly anything will be better than nothing.When you do live streaming there is no time for backup, it either works or not. Better than nothing, that’s for sure, but also maybe marginally better than whatever we had 10 years ago
Really? This is the opposite of my experience with (distil-)whisper - I use it to generate subtitles for stuff like podcasts and was stunned at first by how high-quality the results are. I typically use distil-whisper/distil-large-v3, locally. Was it among the models you tried?
I unfortunately don’t know the specific names of the models, I will comment additionally if I will not forget to ask people who spun up the models themselves.
The difference might be that live vs recorded stuff, I don’t know.
This sounds like a great thing for deaf people and just in general, but I don’t think AI will ever replace anime fansub makers who have no problem throwing a wall of text on screen for a split second just to explain an obscure untranslatable pun.
It’s unlikely to even replace good subtitles, fan or not. It’s just a nice thing to have for a lot of content though.
I have family members who can’t really understand spoken English because it’s a bit fast, and can’t read English subtitles again, because again, too fast for them.
Sometimes you download a movie and all the Estonian subtitles are for an older release and they desynchronize. Sometimes you can barely even find synchronized English subtitles, so even that doesn’t work.
This seems like a godsend, honestly.
Funnily enough, of all the streaming services, I’m again going to have to commend Apple TV+ here. Their shit has Estonian subtitles. Netflix, Prime, etc, do not. Meaning if I’m watching with a family member who doesn’t understand English well, I’ll watch Apple TV+ with a subscription, and everything else is going to be pirated for subtitles. So I don’t bother subscribing anymore. We’re a tiny country, but for some reason Apple of all companies has chosen to acknowledge us. Meanwhile, I was setting up an Xbox for someone a few years ago, and Estonia just… straight up doesn’t exist. I’m not talking about language support - you literally couldn’t pick it as your LOCATION.
