Media Center File Size

[Litmus]

I recorded a 2 hr 1970's movie off the air and the file size was 2.65Gb. I recorded a 3 hr modern movie off the air, and the file size was 28+Gb. I assume that the file size is because one was HD and the other wasn't, but is there a way to compress the HD file or a way in set-up to reduce the recording quality?
The WinTV program that comes with my Haupauge tuner has such an option, but the setting doesn't seem to carry over to Media Center.
Related to this, when I try to copy a recorded TV file to a thumg drive, it tells me that any file over arounbd 4Gb is too large, even though I am using a 16Gb thunb crive. How can I change this?

 

[boohbah]

this should explain why the thumb drive doesn't exceed files larger than 4gb

Why can’t I copy large files over 4GB to my USB flash drive? | WinAbility Software

cant help with reducing the size of the 28+ movie.
you could burn it to a dvd using convertxtodvd or similar,which will obviously reduce it to 4gb roughly

there is some helpful info in this thread also...

http://www.sevenforums.com/media-center/160343-windows-media-center-file-too-large.html