A system for recording a compressed video-audio stream includes a decoder for decoding the video and audio packets of the stream, a multimedia recorder for recording the video and audio portions of the stream, and a video frame editor. In one embodiment the multimedia recorder receives and ignores initial delta frames of the video portion of the stream while buffering the audio portion of the stream received until a first key frame arrives and is buffered and decoded and wherein upon receiving a command to record, the system writes a copy of the key frame at a predefined interval the first interval corresponding with the start of the recording of the audio portions of the stream, the write interval repeated successively until a next key frame arrives whereby the video and audio is then recorded as received.