It seems hit and miss for VLC. I’ve used it for many years in Linux and can’t pinpoint the moment when it became bad for me, but it now has difficulty to read a significant portion of my video files.

It lags when playing videos, or there is sound but no image, or it flickers. It just became unreliable for me. And if we google a bit, there seems to also be lots of people in that situation.

I tried a few things, changing settings and what not, but it never worked correctly again. Even on a fresh install. So I gave up and just use mpv now.

Edit: I just remembered. At one point it was not closing properly. Like, if you didn’t stop the video playing before closing VLC’s window, it crashed and stayed in the background. It opened new instances but every time it was closed before stopping a video, it would just crash and stay in the background. Eventually I’d have 4, 5 or 6 icons of VLC in my notification tray and would have to kill all of them. It was annoying.