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.
They are using open source models that have already been trained. So no extra energy is going into the models.
Of course, I mean the training of the original models that the function is dependent on. It's not caused by VLC itself of course.
Yeah, transcription is one of the only good uses for LLMs imo. Of course they can still produce nonsense, but bad subtitles are better none at all.
Indeed, YouTube had auto generated subtitles for a while now and they are far from perfect, yet I still find it useful.
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.
They are terrible.
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!
They're awful for English videos too, IMO. Anyone with any kind of accent(read literally anyone except those with similar accents to the team that developed the auto-caption) it makes egregious errors, it's exceptionally bad with Australian, New Zealand, English, Irish, Scottish, Southern US, and North Eastern US. I'm my experience "using" it i find it nigh unusable.
ELEVUHN
ELEVUHN
I've been working on something similar-ish on and off.
There are three (good) solutions involving open-source models that I came across:
Vosk has the best models. But they are large. You can't use the gigaspeech model for example (which is useful even with non-US english) to live-generate subs on many devices, because of the memory requirements. So my guess would be, whatever VLC will provide will probably suck to an extent, because it will have to be fast/lightweight enough.
What also sets vosk-api apart is that you can ask it to provide multiple alternatives (10 is usually used).
One core idea in my tool is to combine all alternatives into one text. So suppose the model predicts text to be either "... still he ..." or "... silly ...". My tool can give you "... (still he|silly) ..." instead of 50/50 chancing it.
In my experiments, local Whisper models I can run locally are comparable to YouTube's — which is to say, not production-quality but certainly better then nothing.
I've also had some success cleaning up the output with a modest LLM. I suspect the VLC folks could do a good job with this, though I'm put off by the mention of cloud services. Depends on how they implement it.
All hail the peak humanity levels of VLC devs.
FOSS FTW
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know AI has some PR issues at the moment but I can’t see how this could possibly be interpreted as a net negative here.
In most cases, people will go for (manually) written subtitles rather than autogenerated ones, so the use case here would most often be in cases where there isn’t a better, human-created subbing available.
I just can’t see AI / autogenerated subtitles of any kind taking jobs from humans because they will always be worse/less accurate in some way.
Autogenerated subtitles are pretty awesome for subtitle editors I'd imagine.
even if they get the words wrong, but the timestamps right, it'd still save a lot of time
We started doing subtitling near the end of my time as an editor and I had to create the initial English ones (god forbid we give the translation company another couple hundred bucks to do it) and yeah....the timestamps are the hardest part.
I can type at 120 wpm but that's not very helpful when you can only write a sentence at a time
Yeah this is exactly what we should want from AI. Filling in an immediate need, but also recognizing it won't be as good as a pro translation.
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.
Oh shit, I knew it was tedious but it sounds like I seriously underestimated how long it takes. Good to know, and thanks for all you've done.
Sounds to me like big YouTubers should pay subtitlers, but that's still a small fraction of audio/video content in existence. So yeah, I guess a better wish would be for the tech to improve. Hopefully it's on the right track.
Solving problems related to accessibility is a worthy goal.
It's nice to see a good application of ai. I hope my low end stuff will be able to run it.
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.
I hope they're using Open Subtitles, or one of the many academic Speech To Text datasets that exist.
And yet they still can't seek backwards
Iirc this is because of how they've optimized the file reading process; it genuinely might be more work to add efficient frame-by-frame backwards seeking than this AI subtitle feature.
That said, jfc please just add backwards seeking. It is so painful to use VLC for reviewing footage. I don't care how "inefficient" it is, my computer can handle any operation on a 100mb file.
If you have time to read the issue thread about it, it's infuriating. There are multiple viable suggestions that are dismissed because they don't work in certain edge cases where it would be impossible for any method at all to work, and which they could simply fail gracefully for.
That kind of attitude in development drives me absolutely insane. See also: support for DHCPv6 in Android. There's a thread that has been raging for I think over a decade now
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
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