> lock the thread before people start mentioning nazis.

Which will invariably happen. What was that "rule" called again?

It's Godwin's law (of Nazi analogies): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law

Thanks for this. It seems you got that I misunderstood. I've clarified my point in another reply.

Also agree that if this is a question that keeps coming up a much better response would be to simply explain your reasoning once in an FAQ that carefully presents the argument and point all future discussions to that entry. Done.

To the average user, it's not at all obvious why reverse play is so much harder than it looks. Surely it's possible to understand that users might be confused by this? An well written FAQ on the subject would solve all of this.

The QuickTime API supported reverse play in 1993 (or before), when I enjoyed using it for "back and forth" animated sprites. Here's the documentation I wrote when working at Kaleida Labs on a ScriptX animation library that used QuickTime, and depended on its support for playing videos backwards:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/lang/scriptx/anim.ht...

ScriptX's QuickTime renderer would even play audio backwards and at whatever speed, too. ScriptX had excellent multimedia synchronization, and it would have been considered a terrible bug if it was not possible to synchronize video and audio with any arbitrary clock, no matter what the scale and direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX

The whole point that Remi was making is that doing this for one format is probably easy. Doing this for all formats in a consistent manner with a consistent experience is not easy, verging on impossible. Other players only support a limited set of formats, so can do this easily. VLC supports everything, so therefore has to handle all the bizarre quirks that make this a very difficult task.