every so often, like right now, I'll be messing about on my linux then decised to watch a movie. goto PCmanFM - then go into a directory where I keep me movies, right click, start one up on mplayer, or VCL -- but no sound.

open pavucontrol see that it is working "theoretically" because I can still not hear any sound. everything looks normal but still no sound going to my head phones, or speakers even though it is showing on pavucontrol that it is working properly.

I just end up rebooting then just start up a movie first before doing anything else to my system to fix it, but when I am doing something with my linux this is not always available for me to do.

does anyone know even a command line argument to get it to work when needed, or something that needs to be set inside of a confi file to prevent this from keeping on happeing?

you can explicitely tell vlc to use pulseaudio, from the preferences.