For phonon-qt5, you have the choice to use phonon-qt5-gstreamer or phonon-qt5-vlc as the backend. This is not the case for phonon-qt6, which only has one backend provider in the official repos: phonon-qt6-vlc
If you have any KDE applications that depends on phonon-qt6, pacman will end up installing vlc on your system if you don’t already have it installed—because phonon-qt6 depends on phonon-qt6-vlc, which in turns requires vlc.
For mpv users, there is the option of using phonon-qt6-mpv-git in the AUR as the backend. This allows you to run applications that depends on phonon-qt6 without having to keep vlc on your system.
https://jriddell.org/2023/11/02/phonon-4-12-0-and-phonon-vlc-0-12-0/
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=2155282#p2155282
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So that means I first install phonon-qt6-mpv-git so that the dependencies are still fulfilled and then I uninstall vlc including all photon-qt5 packages and orphans left behind?
Or I’ll wait until vlc can finally keep up with mpv again in terms of quality and let it bumble along on my system …
Not quite.
Install phonon-qt6-mpv-git first.
Then uninstall phonon-qt6-vlc
After you have uninstalled phonon-qt6-vlc then:
Uninstall vlc.
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May I ask why you prefer mpv over vlc?
(Perhaps related to the topic: nothing prevents the screen to go to sleep while playing vlc since the Plasma 6 update.)
@Alexandre mpv is more configurable and lightweight compared to vlc. You can verify the latter by comparing the install sizes of both packages in the extra repo.
I don’t have any problems with vlc per se, but I prefer something less bloated. Also, in my experience, mpv has better performance on older hardware compared to vlc, most likely because it is less bloated.
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I also didn’t want VLC on my machine and unfortunately MPV backend is very buggy and doesn’t work reliably for me. So I decided to try to patch that gstreamer package to build using Qt6 for Plasma 6 and somehow I succeeded 
Feel free to try my AUR package, it really needs some community testing: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/phonon-qt6-gstreamer-git
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No matter how I set vlc, I always notice a slight jerking and stuttering of the video image (mostly mkv). With mpv, everything runs smoothly and without complaint. I don’t care about the interface with all the setting options if the performance is what I need. I don’t necessarily have the worst graphics card (RX 580, RX 6600 XT is planned soon), but vlc always ticks around in some way. Just a legacy issue for me …
sorry for offtopic 
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I just installed phonon-qt6-gstreamer-git 4.10.0_r3316.g2bfadef4-1, just to finally get rid of VLC. So far everything seems to work fine. I’ll probably only be able to find out more in a long-term test, but so far I’m very happy with it 
thank you for this!
