The VideoLAN Forums

To analyze the failures of a machine I am taking video of it. Now I need to view the video one frame at a time, forward and backward. Can VLC do this? If not, does anyone know of a viewer that can?

Thanks!

VLC can only go frame by frame forward (for now, at least). You can do that using the "e" shortcut.

If you need backward frame by frame, I suppose any video editing tool should be able to do so

That's exactly what I need for forward, and it shouldn't take much programming to make it go in reverse, although the mouse wheel would be more convenient.

Odd thing is that the "E" function only works intermittently for me; sometimes a single tap will advance one frame, but other times it takes two or three taps.

And another thing I've noticed; after advancing a long way with the "E" function it stops working. After I drag the progress slider a few frames forward it works again.

It SURE would be nice if a (Shift) E would go backward a frame at a time! (Hint)

I would like to second this request for the ability to view frame-by-frame in reverse. All the other playback skipping functions work in reverse if you add Shift. So why has VLC discriminated against frame-by-frame? Shift+E was exactly the keyboard shortcut I would have suggested but you beat me to it. I can also confirm that prolonged E seems to sometimes get stuck, & I also discovered your workaround, although I usually do it with Shift+LeftArrow. However, the delayed response to E is something I used to see but it went away when I got version 3.0.3.