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In Chrome and Edge you can use WebCodecs to decode and display video frames one-by-one. (this is what I used for the video editor at https://vidmix.app )

In other browsers you could build FFmpeg with webassembly and use that for frame-by-frame decoding but it's not going to be nearly as performant.

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Decoding the video manually seems so much overkill when all that's needed would essentially be a currentFrame property. But it seems I have to explore this avenue as well. I only aim to support Chrome and Firefox but as much as I hate to admit it, Firefox is somewhat lacking on the video side anyway (as there is a bug that lets it display different video frames for the same currentTime than other browsers or FFmpeg [1]). Therefore I already discourage using Firefox for video annotation.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1735300

Yes, the shortcomings of the html video tag are quite unfortunate. Just some very small improvements would make it a lot more useful. One other issue I found at the time I was looking at it (not sure if it's still the case) was that stepping one frame forward wasn't any faster than seeking from a random location. Seemed like the video was decoded from the last keyframe every time, making it inefficient to iterate through the frames.

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