[Montellese]

Also, VFD does not display any icons (nothing changes regardless of what is selected)

The VFD has icons? I didn't know that and the API from Soundgraph only allows icon control for LCDs

1. every time your program displays something, it should calculate the length and first 16 characters display in row #1, and remaining characters in row #2. Further refinement would be to split text at word boundary and not in the middle (or at the beginning) of the word.

If someone volunteers to count the number of pixels every character takes up I can do that. Is the VFD english only or is it able to handle special characters from other languages (like äöü in german or some chinese characters)? If it's english only it could be "pretty straight forward" to put together a list containing the width in pixel for every printable ASCII character and then do the counting.

2. allow user to decide what will go where (personally, I prefer this option). You may include special <newline> delimiter so user can signal that (for example) title should go to first line and episode number to the second. Alternatively, you may change the interface of your program to have two lines for each of:
Playing a movie
Playing a tv show
Playing a song
Playing a music video

In this case, I could write %title% in first line and %artist% in second to achieve the same thing.

Ideally, you may want to take approach 1 while in control mode and approach 2 in "while playing" mode (but it is a lot more work, I guess).

Yeah that sounds like the non-plus-ultra for the VFD but it will also be a lot of work. I'll put your ideas on my TODO/ideas list.