It would seem you installed vlc* from the videolan master ppa. Ocassionaly it will produce builds that complete but have no plugins, ie. worthless.
If you have synaptic installed or can install, open it up, search vlc & mark ALL the vlc packages for complete removal, there will be 5 or 6
(libvlc5; libvlccore5 ; vlc-data; vlc-nox; vlc-plugin-notify; vlc-plugin-pulse
Alternately try this, removing vlc-data should remove all
sudo apt-get purge vlc-data
When you get this all cleaned up & if desiring the newly named 1.2, (vlc-2.0), then use this ppa for a stable build, for 11.10 & 12.04 only
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:videolan/stable-daily
Lp page, - https://launchpad.net/~videolan/+archive/stable-daily