I managed to get Ady's ANH AVCHD to play on Vlc through linux but it was a complicated procedure on a biggish tower and was still a bit choppy because of an issue with the linux version of Vlc which is being fixed (or so they say) so it should work well with other formats if you can get into stream folder (it's not really a job you can do on a laptop, you need quite a fast graphics card for it to cope with all that information rushing through the player at once). It was a head scratching afternoon, which the better half did most of the hard work on (but I made the tea).

Vlc doesn't have a frame by frame step option on any of the versions I've got access to.

What I do is to run the file as slowly as possible and be quick fingered on the mouse button to push pause where necessary it's a bit frustrating at times but it's a small price to pay (in terms of patience) for a player that does almost anything for no money at all.

The digital interence you posted screen captures of look rather like the player is trying to process the file while something else (or the file size) is slowing it down.

So if the file is huge and your playing it on a slow computer or you have process hungry programs running in the background you might get problems like that.

It might also be caused by the player trying to error correct a damaged file.

Haven't a clue about the error message.

It's possible that you were attempting to run the film from a folder with a readme file inside but on all the versions I've got it will ignore any file format that isn't something it can play (that might be down to the settings I have for error alerts).