Hi, @fixit7 
I'm glad that you're having a great day!
Given that you say that "Celluloid" - "Celluloid (formerly GNOME MPV) is a simple GTK+ frontend for mpv" - can open and play all your media, my best suggestion is that you use Celluloid instead of VLC
Although I haven't had issues with VLC, there was the following discussion topic about 3 years ago (in 2022) that showed that some people were having issues with VLC (namely, sometimes the sound was playing correctly but a black screen was showing instead of the video image):
I hope this helps