I run a small FTP server off my laptop and my VLC on my iPad can access it fine.
I found that as I added new dirs to my server, the VLC client shows old list of dir and files. I double checked my ftp connection with iPad Safari and it showed me more dir and files than VLC so it's definitely VLC bug.
I guess VLC is caching FTP responses for fast access. Is it? Is there a workaround for my use case?