Well, that does make sense to me, especially with B-frames.
Actually, if the original poster has the same problem as me, it doesn't make sense. I get the same symptoms as described, but one detail is that the
first frame after seeking is actually displayed correctly, and only all subsequent frames until the next keyframe get corrupted. It seems that the frame I seek to is correctly reconstructed, but the subsequent delta information is applied to an older frame from
before the seek, which is apparently still kept in a buffer somewhere.
Seeking to non-I-frames shouldn't lead to corruption. I don't know how it is usually handled, whether through buffering and/or just decompressing as many frames as needed, but it should be avoided. Software decoders manage, so there's no reason why hardware decoders shouldn't.
Also, while I'm not sure whether an update of VLC or nVIDIA drivers caused the issue, I'd note that I do not get these corruption artifacts when seeking through the same video files on MPC-HC or WMP, which both use hardware decoding as well. I have updated to the lastest nVIDIA drivers and the latest stable version of VLC, to no effect.