With shorter movies, I'm using 1 second in my example, the timeline is so widely spread that you can easily scrub on a frame-to-frame basis, backwards and forwards. See my example here;
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2811229/vlc-sho ... xample.mp4
With longer movies the timeline gets denser so you can no longer scrub frame-to-frame and every little movement is a skip of several frames or even seconds. See my second example with a 1 minute film:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2811229/vlc-lon ... xample.mp4
(The movies is paused and the timeline is dragged in both examples, my pointer is just not captured...)
Adding a little scrubbing tool that shows just a portion of the timeline would solve this issue and we can scrub with great accuracy. See my mockup:
The scrubber shows about 10-20 frames of the actual timeline. When the scrub-head goes closer to the edges of the tool the tool interface moves which portion of the timeline it shows so the head never gets out of frame.
(The red gradient symbolises that the drag work like a rubber band so we get smooth control over the scrub. The scrub tool portion moves slowly along real timeline closer to centre and gets faster at edges so at the far ends it looks like the play head is still and the timeline below moves. Like a jog shuttle or rubber band.)