That size sounds about right for standard definition Wallyhts. As Brian said, the file size will vary depending on the bitrate of the channel you are recording, since you are recording the actual stream without any re-encoding. The PBS HD channels are around 17 megabits, and they'll really chew up disk space. You can actually watch the hard drive activity light speed up on HD channels.
yeah that sounds right. I've been doing some testing with the Visionsat I have and recording 5 minute "bites" of channels and they vary between 100MB and 300MB depending on the transponder.
I recorded a 2:20 hockey game yesterday and it was like 7GB (and the symbol rate was only 6111 so it was pretty low)
I did that but when playing in VLC on my laptop CPU went to 100% and does not play well at all. However when I send it to my video card on desktop to render works perfect and cpu is low under 20%.
Its the HD video... Many computers require hardware-accelerated video cards to play HD video. This is the case especially with MPEG-4 (AVC), which requires a video card with MPEG-4 acceleration. PBS is MPEG-2, but the HD resolution still requires a beefy system.