I'm quite sure that VLC crashes while parsing the manifest file. So i'm thinking that maybe the manifest format is unsupported. It seems that the smooth streaming 'plugin' is completely broken. I would be glad if someone would write trac report -- because it seems that no devs hangs in these forums....
I haven't found any smooth streaming stream that would work with VLC. I've tried various VOD and live streams. Most streams will open but they constantly jump between different quality level / index. There should be an option to choose the stream quality or vlc should pick automatically the highest ...