Starting vlc from midnight commander
 

When I select a video and hit enter it opens in vlc, which is fine. Unfortunately mc then disappears and I'm left with an almost empty xterm until I close vlc. Does the same thing with mplayer. Doesn't do it in XFCE, but does in ratpoison.

The trick is to edit mc's extension handling file ~/.config/mc/mc.ext and make sure that whatever is playing your video doesn't keep stdin/stdout open. I also background it so that mc returns to the panel display.

Here's my mplayer example: