Clearly you are an expert as well, because you obviously know that VLC is just a GUI front-end to Mplayer which you love so much

I'm not sure if your post was pointed at me... but I do assume it.
So, I never told I'm an expert... just happy mplayer user. If my happiness makes me expert? Well I'm about to belive that reading posts of people who found mplayer useless... and they consider vlc better despite the fact
there is no port of vlc for os/2 yet (isn't this topic about porting it? and isn't that forum about os/2)
So what makes me worry about whole disscussion is that some guys try to translate their experiences with mplayer or vlc from other platforms (linux, or like me windoze) forgetting about such factors like sound drivers (alsa vs. oss on linux) or graphics backend (to much to mention) and comes to conclusion that mplayer is weak, crappy, not working and so... - so I did test on vlc and came with similar conclusions about VLC - based on my windoze experience... for me it's worse than mplayer there...
So still I've higher ground - as mplayer for os/2 do exists - and VLC don't. Calling mplayer an app for experts was bit ironic (sorry if you didn't get it) - it's being expert same way as editing config.sys for os/2... - hard to survive on warp without that rare skill... (excuse me - ironical again)
Back to your discoveries - I didn't know VLC is gui-front end for mplayer, and what is more funny guys who work on VLC don't know it either... (they must be wrong of course, claimming it's their project - bad french guys

) but guys from mplayer (hungarian good guys

) did mention vlc as app that reuses the software scaler code from MPlayer so there are some connections indeed (some crucial parts from mplayer are needed to run vlc) ... but not the one you tell, vlc is not gui front end for mplayer. Smplayer is.
You must not be an expert to use mplayer nor to google things.