If he's having performance problems, VLC is the last thing he should try. It's a good "portable" player, but I'd never dream of using it on a computer that I can install something better on.
I was having a lot of lag too watching it on my p00 laptop with coreavc installed and using media player classic. Was fine after I used the k-lite codec pack though
guess my computer is 2bad
There's nothing even remotely as efficient.