VLC media player Gets Even Better With AI-Generated Subtitles

Whether you’re watching a home video, a movie, or a TV series, subtitles can help you understand what’s happening on your screen. However, it can be difficult to find the right subtitles for your movies and shows, and your own recorded videos likely don’t have subtitles at all. Luckily, Video LAN, the makers of the VLC media player, introduced a new AI tool at CES 2025 that will solve this problem.

VideoLAN, the nonprofit behind the popular VLC media player, showed off its new artificial intelligence tool in Las Vegas. This feature will allow anyone using the VLC media player to add subtitles to any video they play. Besides this, Life Hacker also said it could automatically translate subtitles, allowing non-English speakers to read what speakers in videos are saying in their own language.

So, are you watching a family video or legally downloaded the movie to your device To watch it offline, VLC media player will soon let you add subtitles to it, even if you don’t have a subtitle file available.

What makes this tool unique from other AI services is that it runs locally on your device—no internet connection required. This means you don’t have to connect to some remote data center that might misuse your data and consume a lot of power.

You can remain completely anonymous when using this feature, especially since VLC media player does not require any login or personal information to download, install and use.

However, VideoLAN has not yet revealed the hardware requirements to run this feature, although we imagine it will likely require a PC with NPU (which is different from CPUs and GPUs). The organization also hasn’t revealed when users will be able to get this feature, so we’re holding our breath as to when we’ll be able to start enjoying subtitles quickly and easily.

Let’s hope the AI ​​model VLC uses is accurate, otherwise we’ll just end up with comedy gold at the beginning and disappointment with the rest of the video we’re trying to watch.