# Seek vs. play

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/seek-vs-play/291171>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [June 25, 2009, 6:44pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/seek-vs-play/291171 "2009-06-25T18:44:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![vaderist](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b9bd4f/32.png) [@vaderist](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/vaderist)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2009, 6:44pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/seek-vs-play/291171/1 "2009-06-25T18:44:57Z")

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I have a custom video player I’ve built and have been adding a seek function to it lately.

I ran into an issue where seeking backward in the timeline stalled my timecode. I could seek forward and my timecode updated as expected, but seeking backward, my timecode would stall at the current time before the seek was requested.

I run a function on netStream.time() in order to set my timecode.

This is a simplified version of how I solved the issue:

```auto

var stream:NetStream = new NetStream();
stream.play(uri);
stream.seek(seekToTime);

function streamStatus(evt:NetStatusEvent):void
{
	switch (evt.info.code)
	{
		case "NetStream.Seek.Notify":
			stream.play(uri, seekToTime);
			break;
	}
}

```

In a nutshell, I use seek to initialize the change in time, listen for “NetStream.Seek.Notify”, then tell the stream to play the same file at the requested seek time.

It works like a charm. However, I’m curious if there is a drawback to doing this? Also, seek only moves to keyframes. Play seems to be able to move directly to a time. Is this also true?