PPA for gvim > 7.4.338 – Where to Find It

In this case you can see that the uploads to this PPA are done by Björn Michaelsen, who is also the maintainer of LibreOffice in Ubuntu itself, which means it's not just some random guy uploading packages, you know it's someone who probably knows what they're doing.

Personally I feel safe using this PPA, it's used by a bunch of people and I haven't had problems with it so far.

However it is labeled as "test builds and backports", so I would use it for my own personal gear, but I wouldn't deploy it in production if I had to support desktop machines or if I was installing Ubuntu for a new user as even experienced developers can make mistakes in a PPA and probably doesn't get as much testing/exposure as the released version.

There is an extensive PPA here - which is very similar to the lucid bleeding edge ppa (and with the same author) - will uplift maverick to the latest versions of various applications including v1.1.10 of VLC.

However, I would use this PPA with care since it will uplift approx. 69 packages.

I would add the PPA, followed by

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vlc

This should upgrade vlc to the latest version.

Then I would untick the PPA from software sources and re-run

sudo apt-get update

This will stop any further packages from the PPA being installed.

Note - I cannot vouch for the stability/safety or otherwise of any packages from this PPA. As for the majority of PPA's - use at your own risk.