I’ve been having a fun time trying to use VLC’s official Python bindings on 64-bit Linux, and by “fun” I really mean “swearing as pointers get truncated to 32 bits and my app segfaults”. Anyway, turns out the bindings are broken. They make use of a ctypes (mis?)feature that allows you to pass a Python callable as the return type of your function and have ctypes call that function with the actual value and return the result. This is used to make various libvlc_*_new functions wrap the pointer they return in an appropriate Python class.
Unfortunately, there’s a catch. As the docs say, “You can also use a callable Python object (a function or a class for example) as the restype attribute, if the foreign function returns an integer. The callable will be called with the integer the C function returns, and the result of this call will be used as the result of your function call.” A pointer is not an integer, and on 64-bit systems doesn’t fit into one. Worse still, there doesn’t seem to be a way of changing this behaviour – this bad assumption is baked into the lowest layers of ctypes.
Edit: Have managed to fix this issue and put a GIT repository up. You can download the generated vlc.py here. (For some reason, the diff for vlc.py is horribly messy; dunno why.)