Mark,

I could not get that to crash no matter what the settings.

That is consistent with what you have always said -- crash only happens when you build it yourself.

It seems it will only do vdpau with X11, not X11 Opengl. With X11 Opengl, it says

err: Operation not permitted
FFStream::decode: failed
HW device init failed, using SW decode.

but it works fine with X11 direct render.

I saw no difference between using X11 and X11-OpenGL in my tests with tutorial,mp4 using vdpau (my graphics board can not handle DSCF0220.MOV in either vaapi or vdpau).  I think I have some more work to do to understand what is going on because when I run the build binary, tutorial.mp4 works in both vdpau and vaapi BUT the AppImage only works in vdpau.

How close is the test AppImage to what you need to accomplish what you want? if I can not get any better results? 

Logging off the computers for today!