Yes, as long as you practice good OPSec.
The first mistake you made was to ask about it. While logical to ask since you probably didn’t know, you now have an increased risk of linkability. Is the risk enough of a threat? Your threat model and OPSec will determine that.
If your goal is wanting to avoid being identified, planning starts before doing any prior actions.
Like someone else said, it’s unlikely. However it is possible but it would need to exploit your media player (VLC) and/or your OS. As long as your source is trustworthy you shouldn’t have to worry, that’s why the megathread is there.
One thing I forgot to mention. On the deep/dark web nothing is monitored the way the clearweb is, meaning even if you try to avoid some things, you might stumble upon disturbing things. Maybe not images, but walls of texts or something else. My biggest advice if you want to find fun and/or interesting sites would be to look into webrings that either mirror on the dark web from the clearnet or direclty using safe search engines. I can recommend Yesterweb to start with since they not only have a big webring but also a page dedicated to interesting sites liked by the community.
Ahmia is a great search engine. They have a policy that explicitely states that they do not list cp content and they actively remove them on a regular basis if they suddenly pop-up. There used to be some sites that had lists of great and interesting onions but sadly the way onions are shown, many false duplicates showed up and now it’s impossible to find the real original sites (mainly thinking about “the hidden wiki”). If you use Whonix, they have a startpage of their own for Tor browser which lists good and reputable search engines for the network. Hope that somewhat helps.
I like this. I think it may be one of the only post I have ever seen that shows where a privacy minded folk came from and their journey to end up in a place they’re comfortable at. Way too often stories about one’s privacy journey is them being in the pit of despair (understandable) or those crazy stories of how someone who spent years researching privacy and hardening their device ended up picking windows and all their old habits from all those years ago because it was too much for them.
On that note, great job. I’m happy for you and wish you a good time on your regular (perhaps minimal) maintenance.