I’ve actually recently switched my Raspberry Pi from using VLC (and VLC Thing) to gmediarenderer-resurrect with “Generic Media Renderer”. I am moving towards setting up Android devices and using @NWTony’s LANnouncer.
VLC worked fine for me when I was using it, I just wanted to try something else. My Raspberry Pi keeps dropping wifi though and I have to pull the USB adapter out of it and reinsert it. Once I do that all is well again. (This has nothing to do with VLC or gmediarenderer-resurrect).
I am noticing though with mediaPlayer devices, such as I am using with gmediarenderer-resurrect, the SmartThings TTS (Text-To-Speech) cache is not always accurate anymore with the new SmartThings TTS engine. SmartThings Live Logging will show that the TTS engine is skipping generating the sound file for the text and using it from cache, but then use the wrong file that says something totally different than was requested.