Totally agree. Right after the split I had tried playing a DVD and man it was a nightmare. I had to have components I NEVER needed before just to get it to work and I love minimalism, so having me install library’s I don’t really need made no sense to me. I just want the damn thing to work and do what I want it to after all that is why I originally installed it. (un-installed now)
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It was not a monolith by any stretch of the imagination. that moniker would be reserved for programs above a certain size, NOT how many built in plugins it has. No matter how you try to slice it the VLC devs screwed the pooch period.
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Nothing left to say…
Just as a reminder, VLC has nothing to do with it, the decision to split VLC into 500 packages is an decision made by Arch maintainers.
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So I don’t have VLC player installed yet I still get all the updates as you did, am I missing something? I use Haruna + MPV so why the VLC updates?
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This is completely true. I don’t have VLC installed either, and I never had, but I still have a bunch of VLC packages that came with the original EOS installation. Is there any specific reason for this?
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what is the results of
pacman -Qi libvlc
I see it in the update list but with no vlc then what is it a dependency of?
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You may have something which depends on phonon-qt, which depends on phonon-qt6-vlc, which in turn depends on vlc-plugins-base which in turn depends on all those plugins and the kitchen-sink. So welcome to dependency heaven 
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this is what i was getting to just didn’t know the name of the app without doing a search
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Ok, apparently they are dependencies of Okular. Okular needs phonon-qt6, which in turn needs phonon-qt6-vlc, which in turn requires vlc-plugins-base.
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Best response in this thread.
@Noodly and @albersc2, I had the same thing. I found that I still had vlc-plugins-all after uninstalling VLC. I ran yay -Rns vlc-plugins-all to get those off my system.
Yes it’s bloated for sure. I keep it around as it’s the only foss movie player that will play the menu/special features parts of DVDs.
Is this my go-to player for movies/clips? No.
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Well, at least non-Arch users aren’t subjected to this mess.
Though the split has made me realize there is no need for me to use VLC any longer. MPV does the trick perfectly with the front-end of either Haruna or SMPlayer.
Hmm I wonder what I have that relies on it. Maybe JamesDSP or something like that.
Ahhh okay. 
Interesting. Do you use Okular and if so does it still work after removing the vlc plugins?
Okay cool, thanks for that mate. Now I’m wondering what else needs them. Is there a command I can run to see what depends on what?
I haye to say that it doesn’t really make a difference if a update lists 1 or 15 individual packages.
Therefore I don’t really perceive that subdivision of VLC into smaller packages as a mess. An inconvenience at most.
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