Hector Martin

yeah, the video on the left is an MP4 re-encoding of the video on the right. the video on the right, in the .mov container, is Sorenson video. which is easier to scrub through. but the point of the comparison was software in 2020 vs 2002. which includes the codec. so that's 1/2

why I re-encoded it. but it's not an excuse for the modern software. there's so much computing power in this machine. it could easily make scrubbing responsive if it wanted to. (and some software can.) the people who made it just don't care enough.

It's not possible to make scrubbing universally responsive in h.264 except post facto by caching the hell out of everything. Keyframe intervals can be arbitrarily long and smooth scrubbing requires being able to decode one whole GOP per screen frame.

At a typical GOP interval of 30, you need 30 times the CPU power required to decode a video normally for smooth scrubbing to arbitrary frames. GOPs can be even larger than that.

the computer on the left is 500 times more powerful just in CPU than the computer on the right

And h.264 is probably over 20 times more complex to decode than the older codec. Times 30 you're at 600. And nobody is putting exact seek into browser players because it's not going to work for HD video which multiplies the CPU usage again.

i don't understand what the times 30 is here

h.264 frames can depend on an infinite number of frames before them. A more common setting is 30. That means decoding frame 30 requires decoding frames 1-29 too. So you need 30 times the CPU power to decode any *random* arbitrary frame in the time it normally takes to decode one.