VLC is working on offline AI-generated subtitles as it surpasses 6 billion installs

VideoLAN Client, otherwise known as VLC, is a rather popular video player across operating systems, having racked up 100 million installs on the Play Store alone, and that’s nothing compared to the number of its total downloads, recently revealed at CES to be 6 billion. It’s safe to say the entire planet loves VLC’s open-source software; even in the age of streaming, VLC is growing, a testament to its usefulness. And what better way to prove how useful your app is than to reveal real-time local AI subtitle generation? This is precisely what VLC has done this year at CES, rather impressively.

VLC reveals local real-time subtitle creation and translation

If you check out the short video VLC posted on X (Twitter), Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the president of VideoLAN, displays on the floor of CES 2025 how VLC can auto-generate subtitles and translate them to another language in real-time, using what appears to be a video of Ricky Gervais’s famous Golden Globes speech from 2020 (give it a watch if you haven’t). While it is hard to see precisely what is being translated in the above video, VLC did follow up with a few more tweets showcasing Hebrew and German translations, along with French and Japanese.

Real-time translation could mean big things for the future

Seemingly, this display at CES is just a proof of concept, a demo to show what’s possible, as there has been no announcement of the feature’s arrival. Still, AI translation for video content could be a boon, not only for companies that spend funds on translators who don’t always do the best job. Real-time translation for movies and TV could also usher in plenty of benefits for real-time translation of actual conversations between humans, like over video calls. With VLC out here proving just how possible real-time subs and translations are, we likely aren’t far away from a future where differing languages are no longer a hurdle in communication or consuming media.

So not only has VLC earned its 6 billion installs across operating systems by providing one of the best video players around over the last 24 years, but it also appears to be at the forefront of automatic subtitle creation and translation, something anime fans likely know a thing or two about as Crunchyroll eyballs AI for its own translations. In other words, AI translation is inevitable, which is why it’s great to see open source software like VLC embrace the tech so users can roll their own solutions and stop being reliant on corporations.