I am a hardcore VLC fan. For the past 6 years I have been using VideoLAN player without any complaints. I still dont have any complaint with it per se. In fact back in the days of my college, we used to say … when in doubt, use VLC.
What I am saying, is that its hard for any video player to get me to switch to it. I have tried many … but I find myself back to VLC for video and Winamp for audio. Until now. I had heard about Miro being an opensource community led player, had installed it as well … but I had not given it a whirl. I am glad I did.
Miro is a good replacement for VLC, it has community support, built-in downloaders (bittorrent as well!), a healthy set of video streams to download from … and all of then open-licensed (TED Talks, etc). It does take a bit more resources (which is probably why I will still use VLC for my laptops), but it simplifies the playlist management a lot.
Highly recommended that you give this a chance if you have an internet connection.