VLC and bluetooth audio

[snix]

This isn't really a bug, but more of an annoyance that I've had with VLC for years. VLC won't allow bluetooth headphones/speakers to go into sleep/suspended/low power mode when a video is paused.

For example if I pause a video for 30 minutes, my bluetooth device's battery would be draining as if audio were being played for those 30 minutes while paused. With other media players I've tried (IINA, Movist, etc), after a short period (e.g. 5 seconds) the bluetooth device goes into a low power mode where it's still connected to my Mac, but no audio data is actively being sent. Then when video is unpaused, the bluetooth device wakes up and audio/video resumes playback. You can see this by monitoring the bluetoothaudiod system process.

Because of this, VLC has a tendency to hang when the audio is interrupted by the system or some other app. If I pause VLC, do some other stuff on my Mac, and for some reason the bluetooth device went into the sleep/low power mode, when I switch back to VLC and try to unpause the video, it can't recover because it lost the audio stream to the bluetooth device. Have to force quit at this point because VLC is essentially frozen. If VLC were to let bluetoothaudiod "disconnect" (low power mode) from the bluetooth device when paused and "reconnect" (active mode) when unpaused, this wouldn't be an issue.

Are there any future plans to change how VLC works with bluetoothaudiod so that it doesn't maintain an active connection when video is paused?