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VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

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Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#71
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can setup a bazarr instance to use whisper as a subtitle provider.

Looks like it only works if you use the *arr stack, which I don’t.

If you're already using Jellyfin, then why not? Don't want to complicate the stack?

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#73
post #63
post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

What is the alternative? The results could be cached, but it's probably unlikely that they would need to be used again later, as I imagine most videos are watched only once. Another option would be to upload the generated subtitles to some service or p2p, but I believe that would also problem (e.g. privacy, who runs the service, firewalls for p2p, etc).

VLC has a "check my media online" feature, next to "check for updates to VLC on startup" already. Could they offer subtitle downloads?

Previously, that was used for mp3 album covers or something?

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#74

AI subtitle generation seems like a useful feature. Hopefully they'll integrate with a subtitle sharing service so we don't have computers repeatedly duplicating work. In the ideal case you'd probably generate a first pass of subtitles with AI, have a human review and tweak it as needed, and then share that. There's no reason for people to be repeatedly generating their own subtitles in most cases.

Android and iOS already support live captions and AI Accelerators are becoming more common in PC hardware. If you can generate it with little compute at home, then there is no need to set up a share system.

You also want local generation in a lot of cases. If you have your own videos you need to generate them yourself. For Accessibility it's fantastic if they can have subtitles on every Video.

If generating your own is fast and good enough and takes little compute, then it isn't needed to share them. Having subtitles generated by the best models and optimized by humans is better, but not needed in most cases.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#75
post #63
post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

What is the alternative? The results could be cached, but it's probably unlikely that they would need to be used again later, as I imagine most videos are watched only once. Another option would be to upload the generated subtitles to some service or p2p, but I believe that would also problem (e.g. privacy, who runs the service, firewalls for p2p, etc).

It can actually send to Google the information on what you are playing:

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/f908ef4981c93a8b76805ad...

and to their own servers:

https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/f908ef4981c93a8b76805ad...

should could fetch subtitles as the same time ?

edit: cf, what "a3w" says too.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#77
post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

AI subtitles are just text representation of the sound track.

There is no need for artistic interpretation, substituting words, or hiding information. If it’s in the audio, there’s no reason to keep it out of the subtitle.

An AI subtitle generator that takes artistic license with the conversion is not what anyone wants.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#78
post #67
post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

> Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read Please no. Some subtitle companies do think like this, and it's really weird, like when they try to "convert" cultural jokes, and then add in a bunch of more assumptions regarding what cultures you're aware of depending on the subtitle language, making it even harder to understand... Just because I want my subtitles in Eng…

I totally get this. When I'm watching videos for the purpose of learning a language, I want all the actual words in the subtitles. But if I'm watching just ot enjoy, say in a language I don't care to learn, I don't mind someone creatively changing the dialog to how it probably would have been written in English. This happens with translations of novels all the time. People even seek out specific translators who they feel are especially talented at this kind of thing.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#79
post #67
post #52

There's an art to subtitling that goes beyond mere speech-to-text processing. Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read. Sometimes you need to name a voice as unknown, to avoid spoilers. Sometimes the positioning on the screen matters. I hope the model can be made to understand all this.

> Sometimes it's better to paraphrase dialog to reduce the amount of text that needs to be read Please no. Some subtitle companies do think like this, and it's really weird, like when they try to "convert" cultural jokes, and then add in a bunch of more assumptions regarding what cultures you're aware of depending on the subtitle language, making it even harder to understand... Just because I want my subtitles in Eng…

I know a little Spanish and even I get annoyed when the English subtitles don’t match what they said in Spanish. Of course I expect grammatically correct Spanish to be translated into grammatically correct English.

Re: VLC tops 6B downloads, previews AI-generated subtitles

#80
post #47

Very excited for this, but a waste of energy if everyone is needing to process their video in real time.

Why are we still talking about this? Computers are INCREDIBLY efficient and still become orders of magnitude more efficient. Computation is really negligible in the grand scheme of things. In the 80s some people also said that our whole world energy would go to computations in the future. And look today. It’s less than 1%. We do orders of magnitude more computations, but the computers have become orders of magnitude more efficient too.

As another way to look at this, where does this questioning of energy use end? Should I turn off my laptop when I go to the supermarket? When I go to the toilet? Should I turn off my lights when I go to the toilet?

My point is, we do a lot of inefficient things and there is certainly something to being more efficient. But asking “is it efficient” immediately when something new is presented is completely backwards if you ask me. It focusses our attention on new things even though many old things are WAY more inefficient.

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