When you connect a remote computer using SSH, and start a media file with VLC, audio plays at remote host and video (if exists, converted to ASCII) is transferred over SSH to local client, which is kinda cool, I think. If you want to start VLC with GUI on remote, the DISPLAY environment variable should be set correctly.

export DISPLAY=:0

Now when you run vlc command, it starts with GUI mode on remote computer. Moreover, if you want to launch it in full-screen mode, you may set -f flag.

vlc -f mediafile