I'm having a problem on my desktop. My laptop is not affected however. Both are using Ubuntu 14.10.
What happens is, when I open a video file from the file manager, it loads instantly and starts playing. When I close the current movie and go load another video file, it doesn't do anything. VLC loads in system monitor but just sits there and does nothing. At first I thought it wasn't doing anything at all and was just sitting there, but turns out if you wait around 30 seconds, the movie does in fact start playing.
If I load VLC and a video file directly from terminal, this doesn't happen at all, there is no stall, which is very weird.
I made a video demonstrating what it's doing, however I made this video before I realized that if you want 30 seconds, it does load something, but as you see, if you kill the process when frozen, and reload the video, it does open just fine then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKYPb7sKzIo