Stutter and freezing with VLC 2.0.1

Problem

VLC moved from 1.x to 2.x major version a while ago and I upgraded to VLC 2.0.1 Twoflower recently. But, with this version of VLC, I am experiencing stutter and freezing of both video and audio when I play any video file. When I look at the Messages console (Tools → Messages), I see error messages of this form:

ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR is called too late (pts_delay increased to 300 ms)

Solution

There seem to be lots of people experiencing this problem with the VLC 2.0 and 2.0.1 players. A lot of solutions are suggested on the VLC forums, but none of them solve this problem. A major feature that was added in VLC 2.x was multi-threaded decoding, which I suspect might be the culprit here.

Finding no solution, I downgraded back to the last 1.x version: VLC 1.1.9 The Luggage. Video and audio plays fine with this version. I am sticking to it until this problem is fixed.

Tried with: VLC 2.0.1 Twoflower