VLC is my favorite multimedia player but when I run it in Wayland it locks up my desktop and I have to reboot.
Does anyone know a solution?
By the way I am using KDE Plasma .
Did you check https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player?
Post an inxi, works fine here.
Works fine here also. 
I use both VLC and MPV for watching video. KDE Plasma, Wayland session… no issues for me. Works perfectly.
VLC + Wayland + plasma works wirhout a problem for me. (N = 1)
Anything in journalctl?
I had also no problems with it on previous installation on KDE. Now running on Gnome and no issues there also.
Running VLC and MPV without any issues on KDE Plasma + Wayland .
I have consistently banned vlc from my system using phonon-qt6-mpv and that was the best solution for me.
rick:~/ $ inxi
CPU: quad core AMD A8-6410 APU with AMD Radeon R5 Graphics (-MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1006/1000/2000 MHz Kernel: 6.12.4-arch1-1 x86_64 Up: 11h 10m
Mem: 4.69/15.3 GiB (30.6%) Storage: 931.51 GiB (86.1% used) Procs: 297
Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.36
I tried to install vlc-git and got 404 error for wayland-protocols and libkate.
Not enough info.
You mean when you open video file or you open player?
If you open it from command line: vlc what will happen? Any output in console?
Also check in journalctl for errors (after crash and restart):
journalctl -b -1