As a backup, of course it may be a useful tool. I've used both MPlayer and VLC for such purpose for a long time on various OSes. I have for long time seen the mess of multimedia on Linux with 587925 audio and video players, each one with its own UI or written in its own language. At least when they use the same backends there is not duplicate work in that regard!

So don't read as if I'm saying VLC is useless. I just say on long term it is not a viable solution. Especially not in USA where the legality of some plugins is shady; which is why its better to buy a Fluendo Bundle instead. In that regard, it may not even be wise to distribute ffmpeg/libavcodec/xine/vlc/libdecss in Extras-*

Also, Windows users are familiar with VLC having a GUI. On Maemo, it doesn't have one.

I quote from Wikipedia Maemo entry:

Nokia provides these frameworks to be used; not mimicked.

Ofcourse, there are situations where you're OK with an alternative. Qt besides GTK, WebKit besides Gecko. Not ideal, but OK. But if you have for example some applications using WebKit and other Gecko you're not sharing memory from shared libraries where you could, and if you use a Qt application in a GNOME desktop you must load a lot of extra libraries which also uses more resources besides the fact it doesn't look good (yes, even with qgtkstyle).

So if you look at VLC from this angle (duplicating work, different expectation/outcome from desktop port) it is not a very good addition. Instead, we want the right plugins in GStreamer. So if you cannot play content in a multimedia player using GStreamer multimedia framework talk about it here so we can instead get it supported. GStreamer supports tons of plugins as well on Linux/x86-{32|64} hence solution could be as simple as compiling it for Maemo because it already works on Linux/ARM, or we could team up and ask Fluendo to port to Linux/ARM, either by paying then individually for licenses or getting Nokia moved to pay for it with a discount license.