While it is not "loved" like VLC, Quicktime is a huge Framework, does huge amount of work even while if you never used that "player" everyone seems to hate. It comes from Apple which makes living by selling OS and hardware.

Quicktime, as for today, supports OS X Tiger. Supporting 10.3.9 (Panther) is really almost impossible. Only the tools carefully designed not to be hit by OS update issues can still support pre 10.4.0 (Vuescan etc.)

What I try to say is, VLC guys must really explain, in technical sense: Why 10.4.11 is not supported. Who/What to blame? All would say "It must be Apple, stupid" while I don't really think so. Apple maintains, enhances a gigantic media framework named Quicktime. Almost whole OS X can't function without it. I heard they loved GCC 4.2 in XCode 3.x update and they tried to drop PPC support for it while way more complex sources (e.g. KDE 4) doesn't only compile fine with gcc 4.2, even compiles better. KDE 4 is huge... Real huge and yet they didn't say "no 10.4.11" or "No PowerPC".

There are still people who can't use Leopard on their Macs. Apple didn't abandon them (at least, yet) and open source tool abandons them. That is the thing I am concerned about. Not like I am stuck in Tiger or something.

They also give a very wrong signal like... People could think "Well, after a while, it will be snow leopard only... lets stick with closed source which still supports our configurations".