| At FOSDEM 2026, DeepComputing Founder and CEO Yuning Liang joined Jean-Baptiste Kempf, President ofVideoLAN, in the Open Media track to present a forward-looking session on intelligent media playback on RISC-V, combining VLC, speech recognition, and AI-powered text processing. The session explored how open-source media software and AI technologies can work together on emerging RISC-V platforms to enable new user experiences — from real-time transcription to intelligent interaction with video content. |  |
Modern media playback is evolving beyond simple video decoding. Users increasingly expect features such as:
The talk demonstrated how these capabilities can be built using open technologies, including VLC, speech-to-text models such as Whisper, and text-based AI models running locally.
For RISC-V, this represents an important milestone: moving from experimental hardware toward real-world, user-facing applications.
VLC is one of the most widely used open-source media players in the world, with decades of development behind it and a strong cross-platform ecosystem.
Enabling VLC and advanced media capabilities on RISC-V is significant because:
The collaboration between DeepComputing and VideoLAN highlights how ecosystem partnerships accelerate adoption.
A key theme of the session was local AI processing. Rather than relying on cloud services, the demonstrations focused on running AI workloads directly on RISC-V systems, enabling:
This approach aligns closely with the open computing philosophy — giving users more control over their data and experiences.
The session highlighted an important direction for RISC-V adoption: real user applications.
Media playback enhanced with AI is something people interact with daily. Demonstrating these capabilities on RISC-V systems shows how the architecture is moving closer to mainstream consumer computing.
As AI continues to reshape user experiences, combining open hardware with open media software creates new opportunities for innovation without vendor lock-in.
