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Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by DonHopkins on Sunday August 18, 2024 @12:14PM (#41283223)
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

Re:mpv a free, open-source, and cross-platform media player by marcus_holmes on Sunday August 18, 2024 @09:34PM (#41287054)
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.