Now if only I could get it to play nice with my Chromecast... But I'm sure that's on Google.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Or shitty mDNS implementations
accessibility is honestly the first good use of ai. i hope they can find a way to make them better than youtube's automatic captions though.
The app Be My Eyes pivoted from crowd sourced assistance to the blind, to using AI and it's just fantastic. AI is truly helping lots of people in certain applications.
There are other good uses of AI. Medicine. Genetics. Research, even into humanities like history.
The problem always was the grifters who insist calling any program more complicated than adding two numbers AI in the first place, trying to shove random technologies into random products just to further their cancerous sales shell game.
The problem is mostly CEOs and salespeople thinking they are software engineers and scientists.
Spoiler: they won't
Spoiler, they will! I use FUTO keyboard on android, it's speech to text uses an ai model and it is amazing how great it works. The model it uses is absolutely tiny compared to what a PC could run so VLC's implementation will likely be even better.
I also use FUTO and it's great. But subtitles in a video are quite different than you clearly speaking into a microphone. Even just loud music will mess with a good Speech-to-text engine let alone [Explosions] and [Fighting Noises]. At the least I hope it does pick up speech well.
I know Jeff Geerling on Youtube uses OpenAIs Whisper to generate captions for his videos instead of relying on Youtube's. Apparently they are much better than Youtube's being nearly flawless. I would have a guess that Google wants to minimize the compute that they use when processing videos to save money.
I am still waiting for seek previews
MPC-BE
Perhaps we could also get a built-in AI tool for automatic subtitle synchronization?
I've been waiting for ~~this~~ break-free playback for a long time. Just play Dark Side of the Moon without breaks in between tracks. Surely a single thread could look ahead and see the next track doesn't need any different codecs launched, it's technically identical to the current track, there's no need to have a break. /rant
I was part of that!
Thank you for your service
I know people are gonna freak out about the AI part in this.
But as a person with hearing difficulties this would be revolutionary. So much shit I usually just can’t watch because open subtitles doesn’t have any subtitles for it.
The most important part is that it’s a local ~~LLM~~ model running on your machine. The problem with AI is less about LLMs themselves, and more about their control and application by unethical companies and governments in a world driven by profit and power. And it’s none of those things, it’s just some open source code running on your device. So that’s cool and good.
Also the incessant ammounts of power/energy that they consume.
Running an llm llocally takes less power than playing a video game.
The training of the models themselves also takes a lot of power usage.
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This is great timing considering the recent Open Subtitles fiasco.
Huh?
Open Subtitles now only allows 5 downloads per 24 hours per IP. You have to pay for more.
Oof. Well, they have to make money somehow. And probably there were people abusing the site. It wouldn't surprise me for example if many did not cache the subtitles but had them on demand for videos.
Kind of annoying when searching for the exact sub file for the movie file you have.
Especially when half those subtitle files appear to be AI generated anyway, or have weird Asian gambling ads shoved in.
Glad MKV seems to be the standard now, and include subs from the original sources.
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Et tu, Brute?
VLC automatic subtitles generation and translation based on local and open source AI models running on your machine working offline, and supporting numerous languages!
Oh, so it's basically like YouTube's auto-generatedd subtitles. Never mind.
Hopefully better than YouTube's, those are often pretty bad, especially for non-English videos.
Youtube's removal of community captions was the first time I really started to hate youtube's management, they removed an accessibility feature for no good reason, making my experience with it significantly worse. I still haven't found a replacement for it (at least, one that actually works)
and if you are forced to use the auto-generated ones remember no [__] swearing either! as we all know disabled people are small children who need to be coddled!
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I don't mind the idea, but I would be curious where the training data comes from. You can't just train them off of the user's (unsubtitled) videos, because you need subtitles to know if the output is right or wrong. I checked their twitter post, but it didn't seem to help.
subtitles aren't a unique dataset it's just audio to text
They may have to give it some special training to be able to understand audio mixed by the Chris Nolan school of wtf are they saying.
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I hope they're using Open Subtitles, or one of the many academic Speech To Text datasets that exist.
All hail the peak humanity levels of VLC devs.
FOSS FTW
My experience with generated subtitles is that they're awful. Hopefully these are better, but I wish human beings with brains would make them.
subtitling by hand takes sooooo fucking long :( people who do it really are heroes. i did community subs on youtube when that was a thing and subtitling + timing a 20 minute video took me six or seven hours, even with tools that suggested text and helped align it to sound. your brain instantly notices something is off if the subs are unaligned.
You can use tools like whishper to pre generate the subtitles. You will have pretty accurate su titles at the right times. Then you can edit the errors and maybe adjust the timings.
But I guess this workflow will work with VLC in the future as well
Jup. That should always be paid work. It takes forever. I tried to subtitle the first Always Sunny Episode. I got very nice results. Especially when they talked over another. But to get the perfect timing when one line was about to get hidden and the other appears was tedious af. All in all the 25 minutes cost me about the same number of hours. It's just not feasible.
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