5 ms·

how do you like rewind and seeking capabilities?

• JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Most other media has terrible UI for rewind, fast forward and seek compared to tape, whether audio or VHS. Digital video and audio in particular, nearly never have workable (live playback) rewind and fast forward.
  • nitrogen 7y ago
    Use a real video player from anywhere in 2002 or so onward, e.g. mplayer, xine, vlc, Media Player Classic (mplayer is the fastest), with a real video file on your local disk. Fast forward and rewind are nearly instantaneous. For audio, look up a really old program called alsaplayer that could play forward, backward and at any speed. It's not "digital" that makes rewinding and fast forwarding crap on crap devices and services, it's the lack of care for user experience.
    • namibj 7y ago
      Or use mpv. It even works with URLs, supporting youtube-dl to handle many streaming sites.
      • sp332 7y ago
        VLC also supports this, if you Open Network Stream. It's funny they were included in this list, because they are strongly against including a good rewind feature. Modern video codecs refer back to previous frames a lot, so it has to be decoded forwards. It would take a ton of RAM to keep the decoded frame data for "previous" frames so you could play them in reverse. With some video files you won't notice a delay while skipping around, but some you will.
• nosuchthing 7y ago
  It's slower than random access mediums, but tapes have built in memory for track location which is nice when you're listening to something (in the car) and want to switch devices and carry on from your last listening point (books on tape).