Rob, I believe that the two are basically the same. Actually, I think that TyStudio incorporates TyTool into it somewhat. Isn't TyTool just used for the extraction of the video?

From what I can tell, TyStudio is a somewhat buggy step in the right direction towards the world of video extraction. The basic use of the program is the go from video on the Tivo to fully mux'd file of varying formats on your PC. To do this it simply creates an interface which controls a variety of common command line tools that people have been using for Tivo extraction, one of which I believe is TyTool.

So, you open TyStudio, you refresh the list of programs on your Tivo, and choose one to extract. Then you either remove the commercials with the file on the Tivo or extract it first. Once the file is cut, the program calls the muxing tool and automatically passes the offset numbers to it.

Eventually you end up with an MPG file or some other format. At least, this is how I think it worked. It's been about 3 months since I last fooled with it, mainly due to the fact that getting a DVD burnable file from a non-DirecTivo seems to be harder.

So is this how TyTools works, Rob? I may have not been remembering how that one worked correctly.

Many people have done so with many different utilities, and burned the results to VCD or DVD

Hmmm, that's interesting. The process on Tivo is essentially the same. Perhaps it's merely the results that differ, though I've heard that people don't have much of a problem.