VideoLAN, the nonprofit organization behind VLC Media Player, announced in a presentation at CES 2025 that the popular open-source multimedia tool has reached a milestone of 6 billion downloads. While this achievement is quite significant, the figure may be conservative, as the company likely excluded download numbers from third-party sources. Along with that, the developers at VideoLAN announced its future plans with the showcase of their next big feature: AI-powered subtitles and real-time translation for 100 languages. The feature is currently under development and is designed to create subtitles in real-time using open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Interestingly, VLC’s upcoming AI-powered subtitle feature seems to take inspiration from advancements like OpenAI's Whisper, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system designed to transcribe audio into text. Whisper has been praised for its ability to handle various accents and dialects using large-scale datasets for training.
