> Does VLC currently have pretty clear separation between its various components?
Very clear separation. One of the best, tbh.
> Do you think it be much work to spin security-conscious parts like the decoders into separate processes?
Extremely difficult. We've thought about it.
For a video player the 3 parts that are sensitive, are protocols (file, http), demuxers (mkv, avi) and decoders.
The crashes mostly happen in protocols and demuxers, but not in decoders (a contrario from what people think).
The main issue is that the video decoder MUST be in the same process than the video output, for performance reasons (buffer sharing: memcpy is murder) and for hardware decoders. And video output are usually with very high access in the kernels. Moreover video outputs are almost necessarily in the process with the UI thread.
For audio output, it's not good either, although some platforms are better (pulseaudio+Kdbus might work).
