Mpv – A free, open-source, and cross-platform media player

I use it to inspect video frames by frames, particularly being able to go back one frame. VLC doesn't support it, this thread about the feature is hilarious https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=120627

The developer responds to a comment:

But many players are able to do it for years.

with:

If it's so easy, why are you not doing it?

He's not just a butthole, he's a stereotypical open source developer butthole. On the other hand, if he worked for Microsoft, he'd be claiming that it takes a PhD to do it...

In his defense, some commenters had a pretty rude attitude. You cannot demand developers to implement a feature or call them out on being lazy.

Nobody even offered to research how other players accomplish this. They just expect that because they believe it can be done someome should do the work for them.

At least Remi was actually andering questions on the forums.

This attitude towards open source maintainers is what's getting them all burned out.

I don't think the other people commenting were being at all rude. They asked nicely if a feature would be possible. He replied with a blank "No" and from then on it was pretty much "but other players can do it so it must be possible" and him rudely and incorrectly asserting that it isn't and that anyway if it was why don't they do it if they want it so much.

The correct response would have been something like "it's more difficult to do and in some circumstances it will have very bad performance so we haven't done it yet".

This is classic "It's hard and I can't be bothered so I'll make up some technical reason why it's impossible". Programmers do this all the time and it's kind of annoying.

(And yes I understand video coding and I know why it's more difficult in some cases.)

I think the answer (read from between the lines) is more: "There is no way to make it work for the general case of all video formats, and we don't implement a feature unless it works for the general case, so we choose not to implement it at all. If that means that we don't have that feature for the file formats where it would works, that's a sacrifice that we are willing to take."

Agreed, and this is actually a really good point:

> we don't implement a feature unless it works for the general cas

I used to make that mistake a lot. My boss would say "can we do this", for example report memory usage per operation. And I would say "no because sometimes memory is shared between operations so it would be meaningless". In other words I couldn't do it perfectly so I said we couldn't do it at all.

That's what the VLC guy is doing and I didn't realise until I worked with that boss that it is COMPLETELY WRONG!

Just because you can't do it perfectly doesn't mean giving up entirely is the best you can do. In cases like this you can absolutely do something that works sometimes but not in every case and that is way better for users than just giving up.

Lots of programmers fall into that trap though.

VLC is able to abstract over a ton of extremely complicated codecs by providing some common tools that work for all of them.

I guess if VLC has a feature, you can always expect it to work. That's their design choice. There's nothing "COMPLETELY WRONG" about that.