Systems and methods of deferred error recovery in a digital home communications terminal are disclosed. One such method comprises: receiving packets at a delivery rate; filling a decoder buffer from frames in the received packets while bypassing an error recovery buffer; after the level of the decoder buffer reaches an underrun threshold, decoding from the frames in the decoder buffer; and after beginning to decode, filling the error recovery buffer from the received packets and filling the decoder buffer from frames output from the error recovery buffer.