VLC makes a choice not to seek backwards to keyframes, which means you get video corruption.
Seeking is surprisingly difficult. Many container formats don't support it at all, because they don't have indexes, and so it's easy to mess up playback or lose A/V sync by trying it. Constructing the index is about as hard as decoding the entire file too.
Have you tried both? mpv is able to play high resolution HEVC videos backwards at real time by holding the "previous frame" key. VLC can't reliably jump backwards even at second intervals, forget about reverse playback.
VLC makes a choice not to seek backwards to keyframes, which means you get video corruption.
Seeking is surprisingly difficult. Many container formats don't support it at all, because they don't have indexes, and so it's easy to mess up playback or lose A/V sync by trying it. Constructing the index is about as hard as decoding the entire file too.
Have you tried both? mpv is able to play high resolution HEVC videos backwards at real time by holding the "previous frame" key. VLC can't reliably jump backwards even at second intervals, forget about reverse playback.
So? Here is the post where VLC dev explains why you can't seek 1 frame back (you can do that in MPC and mpv) https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=126609&start=...