I think there are two possibilities for what we are seeing. One, the most likely perhaps, is that the scm version comtains the full set of optional dependencies, and maybe one of them is not i586 compatible. I am not sure if vlc loads those optional libs on application startup if they are present, but it is possible.
The second one is that the binary editing has resulted in a segfault for i586. I have seen an improper edit result in a segfault, but it segfaults on i686 and I don't see why it would segfault with one arch and not with another.