Hector Martin

@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.

The 8 second video can be completely decoded into memory easily. It's the codec is irrelevant at that point.

That 8 second video takes 300MB of memory to completely decode into RAM. Do you seriously think it's acceptable for a browser to eat 300MB of RAM for every video you might play or embed into a webpage?

Where do you draw the line? Are we decoding 80 second long 480p videos into 3GB of RAM? Stop and think about the nonsense you're asking the browser to do for a second.

I'm not playing a bunch of videos at the same time. I'm playing one video, in one tab. If I was playing multiple videos, then it could just unload the ones it doesn't need. Or only do it when I start scrubbing.