Surely it can be much more simpler. Imagine using ur direction keys to control the length and width of the movie being played. In MPC we use the keypad to control it. It is much simpler to understand.
And if we press the same keys while holding down the control keys, the movie gets displaced accordingly. Please if u can, try MPC and compare it with VLC. Surely getting it won't be a problem as it is also under GPLv2 license. It is located here <
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli2/> It is also distributed with the klite codec packs.