vlc has been firmly integrated into the system since Plasma 6.xx (dependency phonon-qt6-vlc has been created). Since I have not wanted to have vlc on my system for years now and only use mpv, I have so far been the detour to replace this dependency with phonon qt6-mpv and then completely remove vlc. Since the last Manjaro-ISO (manjaro-kde-25.5-250713-linux612.iso), vlc has no longer been installed, but only the package vlc-plugins-base. Goal achieved, no more vlc on the system.
Now the question: Is it better to continue to do the diversion according to phonon-qt6-mpv and thus remove everything useless, or is the somewhat make-up solution with vlc-plugins-base sufficient?
I couldn’t find anything on the Internet that could clarify this question. There is always only the speech of phonon-qt6-mpv as a replacement, vlc-plugins-base never came as a suggestion.
Just a note though that using phonon-qt6-mpv instead of phonon-qt6-vlc as your backend may cause Dolphin and Gwenview to crash when previewing video files:
I just replicated the issue by removing all VLC packages from my Testing branch system & installing phonon-qt6-mpv.
However, as Dolphin and Gwenview will no longer use Phonon from v25.08, and video thumbnails are still created and display okay in Dolphin, not being able to play previews is an issue that I can live with for the time being.