Hi,
I've had this problem for at least the last year. Any time I open VLC, the CPU instantly spikes to 100%, before I even start playing anything.
It started happening on Big Sur, seemingly randomly one day iirc, and neither resetting all settings nor downloading and re-installing VLC has helped. Today I upgraded to the latest Mac OS (12.6), and I figured that might have solved it. So I re-installed the latest VLC as of today (vlc-3.0.17.3-intel64) for good measure, and tried again. But no luck -- still the instant 100% CPU spike.
I would really love to solve this as I prefer to VLC over any other media player, but cannot use it with this issue.
Thanks,
Jonah