The VideoLAN Forums

It is a well-known issue with VLC that if you try to play a MP3+G file pair that is zipped, it fails to play them as a synced audio/video pair, but rather loads them as separate tracks, and plays them one after the other. While it would be great if this were fixed, there is a different issue that prevents VCL from being used in a scripted context. If you add these files to VLC from a GUI instance, they play fine, and can be scrubbed or the play head moved with the transport controls. If, however, there files are added to a playlist from a scripted instance, the CD+G often fails to show any video (just black screen) and attempting to move the playhead beyond a certain point can cause the video window to close.
Again, these things do not happen when the same files are added to an instance launched from the GUI.

The specific scripted command is:
/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC path/to/myFile.ext --start-time curTime --volume 0 --extraintf rc --rc-host localhost:1234 > /dev/null 2>&1 &

Also, when opening a CD+G file from the command line, the CD+G file is incorrectly times at around 10 seconds in length, whereas the same file opened in the GUI plays fine and correctly registers as over 4 minutes long.