The VideoLAN project has announced that its VLC media player has reached a milestone of six billion downloads. Data collected by the statistics system since February 2005 shows that approximately 4.8 billion downloads are for the Windows version, 380 million for macOS, and 6.8 million for the source code archive.
Notable, the statistics do not include VLC downloads for Linux, since most users of this operating system get the player through the repositories of their distributions.
The most popular version of VLC is 3.0.16, which has been downloaded 416 million times. For comparison, the latest version 3.0.21 has been downloaded 373 million times, version 3.0.20 - 370 million, 3.0.19 - 51 million, and version 3.0.0 - 6.8 million times. The lack of ads and in-app data collection has helped VLC Media Player grow in popularity without relying on commercial revenue streams. VLC Media Player remains committed to being free and ad-free.
In addition, VideoLAN will soon have automatic subtitle creation based on speech recognition and machine translation of text. It is implemented using open machine learning models running directly on the user's device. The latter eliminates the need for an Internet connection or the use of cloud services.
The new feature will be able to create subtitles in more than 100 languages. However, the release date of the final implementation has not yet been announced.
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I have used VLC player for years, it works great for me. 6 billion downloads is impressive. Let’s not forget all of the free skins you can get for it as well. I have so many, I have not tried them all out. I use it offline often. Plays MP3 and MP4. I use Windows 10. –