You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.

There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

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CharlesW 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.

That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.

> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…

Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.

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kalleboo 13 hours ago | parent [-]

It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.

	▲	darkwater 13 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime. I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
	▲	morshu9001 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.

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Tabular-Iceberg 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.

What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.