I am having a similar problem here using Debian (Sid/Unstable) using an ATI Radeon 9000 on a 32 bit IBM compatible computer.
The VLC player shows the first frame and does not proceed any further. On the same machine mplayer2 works just fine and plays the same video. There must be something different in the way that the vlc player and mplayer2 handle the video. Maybe it would be useful if vlc could be configured to use the mplayer2 video handling code.
