Now this was way too stupid and annoying that I had to take the trouble and spread the word. I have some videos in a path where some folder names contain characters like +, (, and ). VLC threw some wierdo “could not open file” error (I didn’t care to read it much).
Copied the file to my root and double-clicked, and it just worked.
I’m sure most of you expect me to fix the bug myself – which I really wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to go through the process of submitting a patch upstream.