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

[email protected]

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.

  • @[email protected]
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    15322 hours ago

    I was just thinking, this is exactly what AI should be used for. Pattern recognition, full stop.

    • snooggums
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      6722 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        1316 hours ago

        I’d like to see this fix the most annoying part about subtitles, timing. find transcript/any subs on the Internet and have the AI align it with the audio properly.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 hours ago

          YES! I can’t stand when subtitles are misaligned to the video. If this AI tool could help with that, it would be super useful.

      • TJA!
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        3421 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
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          1816 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          1020 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

          • @[email protected]
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            16 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          820 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.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 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.

          • snooggums
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            16 hours ago

            That defeats the purpose of doing it in real time as it would introduce a delay.