Methods and systems for recording streaming audio and video by directing an incoming audio-visual stream to a discrete memory region serving as a virtual display. The virtual display is configured with a section visible to the viewer and a section invisible to the viewer, wherein a streaming video is hidden from the user's display under all conditions. The user's browser is pre-loaded with hooks to redirect the video portion of the stream to the invisible section of the virtual memory wherein a video capture tool specifically designed to interact with the hooks can now recognize each function call and intercept each frame as it is rendered in the GPU. Concurrently, the audio portion of the stream is remapped using an audio indexing application. The GPU framebuffers and audio sinks are multiplexed together and saved to disk. The file is immediately accessible for playback or copying.