A method and apparatus for storing uncompressed and compressed multimedia content on a storage device, the uncompressed content is stored in an interim buffer of the storage device. Compression of uncompressed content stored in the interim buffer is done as a background task, storing the compressed content in a long term buffer of the storage device, responsive to a user request to record the multimedia content. Automatically stream the uncompressed multimedia content remaining in the interim buffer directly to a rendering device once the compressed multimedia content stored in the long term buffer has been streamed to the rendering device.