If successful, a malicious third party could crash the player instance. Arbitrary code execution within the context of VLC media player might be possible, though it seems impractical.
Credit:
The information has been provided by Rocco Calvi.
Vulnerable Systems:
* VLC media player 1.1.9 down to 0.8.5
The user may refrain from opening files from untrusted sources.
Alternatively, the playlist plugin (demux/libplaylist_plugin.*) can be removed. This will however prevent use of any of all supported playlist file formats.
Vendor Status:
VideoLAN had issued an update for this vulnerability