I recently tried to use VLC 3.0.8 to play some .MOV and .AVI files from 2005 to 2018 and found that VLC 3.0.8 on LinuxMint nor OpenIndiana could not play the files, however I do remember playing them using VLC 2.2.1 Weatherwax.
As I have an old WinXP vm with VLC 2.2.1 installed, I started it up and it played the .MOV and .AVI files generated by a digital camera without any problem. Equally when I used Celluloid on LinuxMint it could play the .MOV and .AVI files without any problem.
Is the difficulty of playback down to the building of VLC or has the functionality been removed?