There are quite a few articles alleging that VLC contains 'malware', or 'chinese hacker urls'.

I know the software is available on gitlab (although they typically ignore pull requests).

Has anyone spun up VLC in a VM and monitored the attempts for network access to check any of this?

I imagine that if any group would get to the bottom of this, it would be HN.

I'm not up on the latest but a long time ago someone purchased a similar domain or a better domain than the original developers and they cooked their own version that had bad ingredients.

Discussed 12 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32441911