I used SmartRipper to rip a home video DVD to my hard drive, and renamed the resulting .vob files to .mpg. This appears to have worked. My Vegas 4.0 editing software wouldn't import vob, but it ...
I used kmttg to extract episode of the Winter Olympics from my TiVo to my Mac. After the default transfer, decryption, and transcoding (all default settings) I'm left with a 7 hour, 30 GB MPG file.