VLC crashes when I start a Steam game

Tried to reproduce your problem but nothing happens here. Everything works fine.
With what games happens more often?

uninstall it and re install and it should work fine , mine hardly every gives me a problem.

I have never liked VLC player but what its capable of is great, have you tried updating?

You should try PotPlayer, it's much better than VLC and pretty much any player out there, and stable: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/PotPlayer

Running full screen games in compatibility mode is usually the culprit for me but its intermittent.

VLC sucks. Use Media Player Classic.

Sorry for hijacking, but my recent problem seems related.
I'm playing games on "Monitor 1" and watching fullscreen video clips on "Monitor 2" - you know, because I can.

Recently I've noticed that on some games (the newer ones, all of which require DX10+) my VLC just stops the video stream. Audio is fine, though.
So, when I try to play Warframe, for instance, "Monitor 2" is just a still frame or black.

Is there any known fix to this?
I've deactivated hardware acceleration, both of my monitors are connected via DVI to the same GTX580.
Oh and for the past couple of months I noticed that "Monitor 1" "blacks out" from time to time - I had googled for a solution and upped the voltage a tiny bit which has solöved the problem temporarily - but NOW I'm getting blackouts again :/

Grateful for any help on this,
Abaris

I had a similar issue with VLC recently crashing every time I swapped monitors. I had no problems with any other programs and checked everything I could think of (reinstalled, tried old versions that had previously worked, video driver updates, etc) with no luck. Turned out to be an issue with the Catalyst profiles I was swapping between. I'm guessing maybe something got slightly bugged in the profiles, causing the display driver to (silently) correct itself and trip up VLC in the meantime.

As you've probably guessed I don't really know what I'm talking about, but not using the old profiles solved it for me, and it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch that the resolution, etc. display adjustments from launching a game might have similar consequences, so I figured I'd throw it out there. Good luck!

Try changing VLC video output to opengl or direct2d. Directx 10/11 games tend to crash VLC with certain video outputs.

I nowadays use the same player in Windows I use in Linux: SMPlayer (it uses mplayer under the hood.) I've set the video renderer to OpenGL and never had problem. I especially like it for its YouTube support. I just drag and drop a link from YouTube into the player window and it plays it.

Tools > Preferences > Video > Output

It defaults to Automatic, I believe. Basically, what is happening, is that you are both trying to use DirectX at at the same time, and for some reason getting into conflict. Try Open GL, or some other option.

I don't know if it's related, but I had the same problem when alt-tabbing. Got it fixed by changing VLC video output to something else (while still having only 1 monitor).