[MPlayer-users] how to "step backforward" ?

[Phil Rhodes]

> Video files consist of intra-frames and inter-frames.

Yes.

However, there are better approaches than the brute-force technique employed by virtualdub (though that would be better than nothing), mainly involving some sort of caching. A general solution might cache complete decoded frames, at a considerable memory penalty, or you could let codecs implement it and they'd only have to cache the data they needed to reconstruct the previous frame at any one time.

My feeling is that the full frame caching is certainly more general and probably easier to implement, and would mean consistent behaviour regardless of source. People will scream about the massive memory footprint, but it seems like a reasonable application of RAM to me.

How does Quicktime Player do it? It works very well.

P