Still present in 20.04 (Focal) with vlc 3.0.9.2-1, though here at least it seems to only affect some URLs, not all. When I view a stream from my local webcam, vlc -vvv in the terminal shows

main playlist debug: incoming request – stopping current input

as the final message, and does not exit (after closing the window; Ctrl-Q still works). But when streaming from Wowza’s RTSP test stream [1], vlc exits just fine after closing the window.

Debian bug 916595 [2] and related VLC ticket [3] mention disabling hardware acceleration as a workaround, but even so I was unable to make it work (i.e. exit properly).

Possibly related: Ubuntu bug #1847162. There’s also been discussion about the issue over on Manjaro forums [4].

* [1] rtsp://wowzaec2demo.streamlock.net/vod/mp4:BigBuckBunny_115k.mov
* [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=916595
* [3] https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/20627
* [4] https://forum.manjaro.org/t/vlc-not-closing/69965/2