Hector Martin

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.

Try encoding your video on the left with GOP size 1 and I bet it'll seek as smoothly as the video on the right.

(It will also be much larger, but still smaller than the video on the right since h.264 is still going to be a better codec even in intra only mode)

@marcan42 didn't say "it's not possible" but rather "it's not possible to make scrubbing universally responsive" Modern considerations go further than those from 20+ years ago, and will skew heavily towards reduced power usage.

It doesn't need to scrub a 90 hour 8k video file. It's just a regular, short video file, at low resolution. It fails at it.

Scrubbing a 90 hour 8k video file visually smoothly takes *less CPU* than scrubbing an 8 second 480p file at libx264 default settings, because non-exact seeks don't matter when your video is 90 hours long.