Following a comment by artie in another thread, I decided to investigate alternative media players (other than QuickTime, which is just a shadow of its former self), in particular the above-captioned.
The VLC media player is in version 1.1.12 for Mac OS X and is 64-bit for Lion. Upcoming is version 1.2.0 (currently in beta).
Various blurbs give it full marks. The big "but" is that I can find no really intelligent or in-depth reviews of the VLC MP — most often they're just rehashes of the distributor's release notes, which are meager themselves — and those that do pop up in the search almost invariably have ads on the websites for MacKeeper, which has been almost universally condemned in these forums — ergo, suspect review sources.
Any experiences with VLC out there — good, bad or ugly? Recommendations?

You might try a search on these forums for VLC as a place to start. There are a number of references to it.

Been there. Done that. Most commentary is dated and of not much value, as applies to the latest release (1.1.12) which supposedly fixes previously encountered issues.
I'm looking for users' experiences with the latest version(s), if at all possible.

To look into all video playback options, would you mind elaborating on exactly what you found missing in QT, or what you'd like to see in/with it? It would also help to know if you installed freeware Flip4Mac WMV Player and Perian (assuming they are Lion compatible) to extend QT's compatibility with a variety of video formats?

VLC is a great player.
I do recommend it.
[end of "review".]

I did indeed install Flip4Mac WMV Player (version 2.4.0.11) to augment QuickTime 10.1. Not sure what Perian is; I'll check it out sometime.

My main gripe about QT is that it now waits for complete download before playing will start; my previous QT (from Mac OS 9) permitted (partial) playing during downloading. It remains to be seen if VLC will achieve that.

Just to be clear: I'm not looking for 'exotic' media player capabilities, such as editing videos or anything else. So, reading too much into my quest(ions) might well be a 'fool's errand'.

Perian adds additonal codecs to Quicktime in addition to those added by Flip 4 Mac.

Deleted in favor of Flip4Mac sans QuickTime?.

Start a separate thread for your question please.