VLC keeps freezing on Mac OS X El Capitan

You do not have the latest version of VLC for OS X, at the present time, the latest version of VLC for OS X is 2.2.2, so you might want to try it and see if the issue persists.

In clicking VLC > Check for Update..., note as shown in the image below it says:

More than 100 fixes for issues reported for 2.2.1.
Full support of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan.

Note: If Check for Update... doesn't work then click the link above to download the vlc-2.2.2.dmg file and manually install it after deleting the existing application bundle.

Not sure if anyone is still having this issue but I just installed the latest version 2.2.4 and it had the same issue on Mac OS Sierra. The fix for me was to download VLC 2.0.10 - www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html