Howdy All,
My name is John T. Haller and I'm the developer behind a few different portable application efforts (like Portable Firefox and Portable OpenOffice.org). There's been a good amount of interest in getting a portable media player as part of the project and a few people had suggested VLC.
Basically, the way a portable app works, is that a launcher is added to handle things like figuring out directories, passing commandline parameters and editing config files to adjust paths. Then, the included app is often compressed wih UPX (and 7zip in the case of JARs) to save space... as portable apps are often operating from devices where space is at a premium.
I've put together a test version of a Portable VLC Media Player here:
http://portableapps.com/node/760
I haven't done a general release and this has just been for development testers to try, but I wanted to make sure a release of this nature was ok with you guys before I went any further. I'm more than happy to have involvement from you guys, too.
Feel free to drop a note on here or on the PortableApps.com forums as I'll keep an eye on both.
PS - And for any non-developers, please don't spread it outside the forums (to blogs, etc) until we're sure the VLC guys are happy with it.
Regards,
John