Enabling Intelligent Media Playback on RISC-V: VLC with Whisper STT and Qwen T2T on Next-Gen RISC-V AI PCs
K.4.601 | Day 1 | 13:05 - 13:25 | Speakers: Jean Baptiste Kempf, Yuning Liang
Abstract
This joint talk by DeepComputing and contributors from the VLC project showcases how intelligent media playback and real-time audio processing are becoming a reality on open RISC-V hardware. We demonstrate VLC running Whisper (speech-to-text) and Qwen (text-to-text LLM) on ESWIN’s EIC7702 SoC with a 40-TOPS NPU, achieving practical AI-enhanced multimedia performance entirely on RISC-V. We will walk through the porting process, performance tuning across CPU/NPU, audio pipeline integration, and the technical challenges of enabling real-time inference on today’s RISC-V AI PCs. The session will also preview our upcoming 16-core RISC-V platform and discuss how VLC’s evolving AI support roadmap aligns with this next generation of RISC-V hardware. Together, we outline the upstreaming efforts required to bring AI-accelerated playback, real-time captioning, translation, and other intelligent media features to the broader open-source community.
Speakers
Jean-Baptiste Kempf is the creator of the VideoLAN non-profit and a key figure behind VLC media player. Heavily involved in the past 20 years in the open source ecosystems, he is the maintainer of dozens of open source projects, has founded multiple startups in the multimedia and gaming space, advised VCs and numerous startups and has led large engineering teams at scale.
Since close to 20 years, he has been a key contributor to numerous open source projects, such as FFmpeg, x264, dav1d, VLC and a few others, which are powering most of the video streaming services. Active proponent of the open source ecosystem, he has also been the president of the VideoLAN foundation, since its foundation in 2008.
He is also the creator and leader of Kyber, a new open technology start-up made to control machines, drones and robots in real time.
JB is also member of the European Open Source Academy.
Yuning Liang is the Founder and CEO of DeepComputing, focusing on developing innovative technology products based on RISC-V SoMs. From the world's first RISC-V development laptop DC-ROMA to pads, workstations, remote-controlled cars, drones, and more, all are based on RISC-V chips. The world's first RISC-V laptop, the world's first RISC-V pad capable of making phone calls, and so on, are all Yuning's masterpieces. Yuning's innovation and pioneering spirit in the RISC-V field have enabled him to create several world firsts, leading DeepComputing to gain widespread recognition in the global RISC-V product commercialization field, contributing significantly to the advancement and progress of RISC-V technology. Yuning's career has taken him from the UK to Switzerland, then to South Korea, and finally to China. He has a strong practical background in embedded systems, platform APIs, and system software. In 2024, he was honored with the "RISC-V Community Contributor Award" and recognized as a "Ubuntu Summit Contributor," further solidifying his influence in the technology sector.
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