The video player is testing a new AI tool to create subtitles in over 100 languages.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37011397

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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.

  • TJA!@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    263·
    13 hours ago

    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”

    • snooggums@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      8 hours ago

      Regular old live broadcast closed captioning is pretty much ‘good enough’ and that is the standard I’m comparing to.

      Actual subtitles created ahead of time should be perfect because they have the time to double check.

    • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
      231·
      12 hours ago

      Or they can get OK ones with this tool, and fix the errors. Might save a lot of time

    • LandedGentryEnglish
      6·
      12 hours ago

      Honestly though? If your audio is even half decent you’ll get like 95% accuracy. Considering a lot of media just wouldn’t have anything, that is a pretty fair trade off to me

      • TheMachineStops@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        61·
        8 hours ago

        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.

        • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          That’s probably more due to lack of training than anything else. Existing models are mostly made by American companies and trained on English-language material. Naturally, the further you get from the model, the worse the result.

          • TheMachineStops@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            31·
            4 hours ago

            It is not the lack of training material that is the issue, it doesn’t understand context and cultural references. Someone commented here that crunchyroll AI subtitles translated Asura Hall a name to asshole.

    • TachyonTele@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      13 hours ago

      I have a feeling that if you care enough about subtitles you’re going to look for good ones, instead of using “ok” ai subs.

    • shyguyblue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      I imagine it would be not-exactly-simple-but-not- complicated to add a “threshold” feature. If Ai is less than X% certain, it can request human clarification.

      Edit: Derp. I forgot about the “real time” part. Still, as others have said, even a single botched word would still work well enough with context.