Available storage media capacity for personal video recording increases
continuously. metadata can be used to organize the recordings, search for
content and access specific recordings. If metadata are embedded within
the multimedia content itself, like DVB specific Service Information,
which are multiplexed with the audio and video streams to form a MPEG-2
transport stream, a search based on this metadata would require an
inefficient and time consuming search through all multimedia content
stored. According to the invention metadata information is gathered,
analyzed and processed to form metadata entities, which are amended by a
reference to the content itself. A descriptor stream is formed from the
resulting pairs of metadata entities and references to the content and is
stored separately from the files comprising multimedia content. In this
way, for data of an MPEG-2 transport stream the metadata can be accessed
without a need to reparse the entire stream.