--aud has never worked

[Former user]

In x264, this switch allows for near perfect seeking without drawbacks and in x265 it does nothing to the stream

[Deepthi Nandakumar]

It does "nothing to the stream"? Can you be more specific ?

aud signals the start of an access unit/slicetype. For seeking, you probably care more about locating random access picture points.

[Shaylen Reddy]

Yes, that's what I meant. It doesn't exactly allow you to access any picture at random, there is a small delay in the process which I think is because it's trying to decode predecessor frames first to get to the point in which you request. Sometimes you do get the picture point you want but it's probably just the start to a new GOP.

[Deepthi Nandakumar]

So, aud is not sufficient for random access or seeking. Depending on your system, aud may be necessary, but it's almost always not sufficient for random access.

For random access, you need to think about the GOP structure, and random access points (enabled by closed-gop, open-gop and of course, the size of your GOP).

[Shaylen Reddy]

As of 1.8+111 the [--aud --no-open-gop] pair works.

It's up to you to decide whether this is resolved.