A few hours ago, a new and improved version (2.4) of the VLC bittorrent plugin was uploaded to Debian. This new version include a complete rewrite of the bittorrent related code, which seem to make the plugin non-blocking. This mean you can actually exit VLC even when the plugin seem to be unable to get the bittorrent streaming started. The new version also include support for filtering playlist by file extension using command line options, if you want to avoid processing audio, video or images. The package is currently in Debian unstable, but should be available in Debian testing in two days. To test it, simply install it like this:
apt install vlc-plugin-bittorrent
After it is installed, you can try to use it to play a file downloaded live via bittorrent like this:
vlc https://archive.org/download/Glass_201703/Glass_201703_archive.torrent
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