I have always noticed that rewinding a video even for 15 seconds takes a lot more time to buffer in any app than forwarding it even by 1 minute, why is it so?
Isn’t the previous one already loaded and so should appear instantaneously?
In: Technology
This can have something to do with how video compression works. You don’t get every frame streamed to you that you see. You get a handful of keyframes, and then a bunch of instructions on how to change that keyframe to make it look like the next frame. (This is why when a video gets corrupted everything will go really messy and sometimes green, for a few seconds and then back to normal when it loads in the next keyframe).
Going forward, the system just runs the instructions quickly, which is a client side activity.
Going backward, the system needs to find the closest keyframe to where you want to skip to, download that, and then download all the instructions after that to get you to the point you want to view, and then apply the instructions to the keyframe so that you can view there.
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