I have this problem on my RazPi 4 w/4GB of ram.

On the face of it, VLC is the most likely culprit. But I grabbed the same vlc package from another mirror and the checksum is identical. If it was causing issues, I'd expect to have heard about it. I am left wondering why one program can lock out everything on a 4 core machine, even a running process. Could it be a hardware issue?

I must confess that my RazPi is overclocked to a conservative 2Ghz with 'overvolts=5'. It has been overclocked for some time and causes no issues.

yes. Yes, it can be a power supply issue, a hardware issue, an overclocking issue or a software issue. Anyway you can definitely disable overclocking (temporarily) and check if that solves this issue.
Also you can try to measure temperature.

I can't measure temperature because I was locked out over ssh. I will disable overclocking just to eliminate it. In terms of the Pi, however, that overclocking is within limits. Later models ran at 1.8Ghz, indicating they were overclocking it themselves.

I'm dating this to the last update to slackware-current, more or less. That included a glibc change, so I can't revert to the old vlc. mpv does fix the issue, but mpv sucks playing 1080p videos. LibreElec is good on Videos. It's a ramdisk which has Kodi. I'm taking it as a vlc issue until I find otherwise.

But all sbcs are scarce right atm so I hope it's not hardware. Mainline CPUs are a tough sell because pc sales are down andeveryone's cutting back inventory, but all sbcs are still in short supply.

Ok. I sorted this by dropping the overclock. Full story here, so I'll link to avoid a double post

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...10#post6410810