system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does skipping five seconds of a video often take longer due to buffering than just sitting through the five seconds?
gpt
The way online video is compressed, you're receiving data that represents incremental updates from the last frame. If you start playing the video at the beginning, it all works as intended.

However, if you start playing in the middle, you need to process incremental updates for some time period prior to the frame you want to see before you can display it. It takes time to download both the incremental data and process it.