On my iPad, if I leave my VLC in paused state for few minutes, so the screen goes off, when I re-open my iPad, and press the Play button in VLC app, it starts playing for a few seconds, and then skip the current film, and auto-start playing the next one from my SMB network share.
Device: iPad14,8
OS: iPadOS - 17.5.1
Locale: hu (HU)
VLC app version: 3.5.7
libvlc version: 3.0.18-298-gfa48bfaa11
hardware decoding: 0
network caching level: 999
skip loop filter: 1
RTSP over TCP: 0
Audio time stretching: 1