@PeterDuke

I think you are correct, and this does imply that AVC can be smart rendered. If what Marco et al are saying is true, the only way to jump into the "middle" of a video stream and play from there would be to go back to the very beginning and decode the whole thing. That seems unlikely.

AVC is H.264 encoded, and H.264 encoding was created for broadcast as well as other uses. If you could not smart render H.264 it would be useless as a broadcast format since you would have to turn on the TV the day the broadcast started and never turn it off.