Hello,
On VLC 1.1.11, the current stable release, GPU acceleration seems to work (i.e. it doesn't crash my computer).
However, I have tried a wide variety of releases from the git from 1.3.0 to 2.1.0 and all of them have the same problem. With GPU acceleration active, video does not even play. The player just quits whenever I try to play the video. Without GPU acceleration, everything is fine.
I know that these aren't stable versions, but is there anything I can do to get GPU acceleration working? I have a Mobility Radeon 5800 GPU and i5-480M processor.