youtube-dl is much better at fetching video streams for various sites from my experience. An example bash script of how to use youtube-dl with VLC can be found in this issue.
Could also be used to, for example, only play audio from sites that support it, such as vlc using --extract-audio
Oh, and it could also (maybe, with some work) be used to play playlists.

I will use VLC 4 in the next version, which will hopefully fix most of the issues.