BTW not that it matters - but my text should have said that without that option it plays AUDIO only and NO VIDEO (not the other way around). Anyhoo, it is fixed now and I can start it from my dock.
VLC used to work fine for my use as a baby cam viewer on my Mac (Intel) until one of the versions broke it. After that, I could only get VIDEO but NO AUDIO at all. After much searching I found out that if I were to start VLC from the command line with the "--ffmpeg-threads=1" option, then ...