Raspberry pi 3 MMAL player fails to decode video

I have built VLC on the raspberry pi 3 against mmal.

At first, I had issues building it. It complained about missing mmal_* methods.

I modified the configure.ac file to add -lmmal_core after -lmmal and the plugin builds fine. But then, I cannot play a video. The window opens, displays the "cover" of the video, then closes, opens a new window in an infinite loop. Please find attached the logs