i can imagine how it would be annoying in a system that is designed to process live streams as opposed to one that is designed to have random access to the stre

i can imagine how it would be annoying in a system that is designed to process live streams as opposed to one that is designed to have random access to the stream via persistent storage. if the target frame were not an i frame, you'd have to dig up the preceding i frame and replay everything up to the target frame. pretty easy for random access, not so much for a monotonic stream of frames.