Elisa supports using qtmultimedia's own facilities for audio playback,
rather than using Elisa's own custom VLC-based backend, which it will
prefer if available at build time. qtmultimedia's default backend on
most platforms is ffmpeg, and anecdotally, it's giving me better
performance than Elisa's VLC-based backend was.
It seems like most distributions build it with libVLC, with the notable
exceptions of Fedora, and Gentoo (which of course makes building with
VLC user-configurable).