That's really cool. I use their tool p4merge for diffing and merging for TFS (shh) and git and it's awesome. They offer it as a separate download, would be great if they opensourced this :D

I don't think since this is deeply integrated into their SCM. Git playback evolving into a time lapse view would be awesome.

I wonder what their license/patent is on this application, would it be untoward to imitate this style without repercussions?

The way I understand (correct me if I am wrong) is that Perforce’s value add with features like this is what makes it sticky. So from my gut they will have some patents on this.

But that said, I had once used http://code.google.com/p/svn-time-lapse-view/

The experience wasn’t usable at all since there was no caching, prefetching etc. Each move of the slider resulted in a web request.

But git is a different story …. :-)