cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37011397
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.
And yet they turned down having thumbnails for seeking because it would be too resource intensive. 😐
Video decoding is resource intensive. We’re used to it, we have hardware acceleration for some of it, but spewing something around 52 million pixels every second from a highly compressed data source is not cheap. I’m not sure how both compare, but small LLM models are not that costly to run if you don’t factor their creation in.
All they’d need to do is generate thumbnails for every period on video load. Make that period adjustable. Might take a few extra seconds to load a video. Make it off by default if they’re worried about the performance hit.
There are other desktop video players that make this work.
I mean, it would. For example Jellyfin implements it, but it does so by extracting the pictures ahead of time and saving them. It takes days to do this for my library.
It is useful for internet streams though, not really for local or lan video.