Passthrough is the best?

[masterlogic]

Hello everyone. To copy a movie from a BR disc to a hard drive without any loss of quality (video and audio), is passthrough the best option?
How do you do it? My intention is to pass an intact copy of the BR to a hard drive and then watch it on TV. Is MKV the ideal format, or what should be the use?

[wgk.derdicke]

Passthrough gives you the unmodiefied format of the source. There will be no crompression or rendering to a specific resultion. If your source is good, you will get a good result. It won't turn bad due to compression or redering. If your source is bad, you will get a bad result as well. But it won't get worse because of tampering with the video/audio data.

If you know the proper playlist - usually DVDFab will show you a playlist - you can rip this by using DVDFab Ripper.

If the MKV format is the ideal format for you, that depends on your hardware. Some players are unable to play MKV. MP4 would be an alternative.

Due to sync issues, which I had to experience, I go this way:

1. Copy the BD as full disc to my NAS by DVDFab Copy
2. Try out of the BD by PowerDVD
3. While the BD is played by PowerDVD, retrieving the proper playlist by MS Process monitor
4. Create a BD ISO without menu, which contains only the movie, by ClownBD using the retrieved playlist (ClownBD calls eac3to, tsMuxeR, ImgBurn), usually with German and English language and subtitles (if provided)

Yes, it's more complex than simply rip the movie by DVDFab, but there are no audio and/or subtitle sync issues. Those I ran into at first, as I started ripping with DVDFab. And the above-mentioned procedure is my workaround for that issue.

[DWreck1995]

Hello everyone. To copy a movie from a BR disc to a hard drive without any loss of quality (video and audio), is passthrough the best option?
How do you do it? My intention is to pass an intact copy of the BR to a hard drive and then watch it on TV. Is MKV the ideal format, or what should be the use?

1. Use the "Clone/Burn" feature from DVDFab Copy to make an ISO of the disc. Then use a media player like DVDFab Player to play the ISO directly.
2. Use the M2TS, MKV or MP4 "Passthrough" feature from DVDFab Ripper to remux the video, audio and subtitle streams into one file. I typically use M2TS as it's the container already used for the movie. However, it cannot keep things like chapters markers for example. So if that's important to you than MKV or MP4 is your best bet.

No matter which one of these options you choose there will be no re-encoding. So there won't be any quality loss. The only possibilities are just playback issues from time to time or missing features like Dolby Vision that simply cannot be remuxed without some form of quality loss at the moment. To be 100% perfect, it's best to just clone to another disc and use a standalone player. But, that's an expensive habit for the 1% of the time you'd ever benefit from it.

[masterlogic]

Thank you wgk.derdickeand DWreck1995 for sharing your experience. It seems all more complex than I supposed. If you lose part of the Dolby Vision, I'm no longer interested.
I always make a copy of my original films. I keep the original disc and to watch it I use the copy (many are cartoons and if you have children .....). My intention was to replace the disk copy with a copy on hard disk and play it from my NAS. Perhaps the best solution remains the copy on another disk.
By the way, DVDFab offers two options to copy one is "full disk" and the other "clone"
What are the differences between them?

[wgk.derdicke]

Are you talking about UHD? There I have no experience. I wield only DVDs and standard Blu rays.

Full disc copy means that the complete content of the disc will be copied to a hard disc. You can choose whether it becomes a single ISO file or a folder with subfolders as your file explorer shows you the disc. With this mode you usually get rid of any copy protection measures. Please note that, as far as I know, if the cinavia removal is active, the audio data has to be tampered with. So if you player does not bother with cinavia, you do not have to remove cinavia.

Clone means that you will get a clone of your disc. Either as ISO file on your hard disc, so that you can burn it later to a disc, or direct to your disc drive onto a blank disc. As far as I know, one can choose whether the protection measures will be kept or not. One may tell me if I'm wrong here.

To wield the discs in front of the disc player is the most unattractive way to run your own home cinema. I copy every disc I purchase to my NAS. And I'm talking about a lot of discs! Pushing the buttons of the media player's remote control is much better than juggling the real discs from disc box to disc player and return.

[DWreck1995]

Thank you wgk.derdickeand DWreck1995 for sharing your experience. It seems all more complex than I supposed. If you lose part of the Dolby Vision, I'm no longer interested.
I always make a copy of my original films. I keep the original disc and to watch it I use the copy (many are cartoons and if you have children .....). My intention was to replace the disk copy with a copy on hard disk and play it from my NAS. Perhaps the best solution remains the copy on another disk.
By the way, DVDFab offers two options to copy one is "full disk" and the other "clone"
What are the differences between them?

You can keep Dolby Vision with the MP4 container but the audio has to be re-encoded. That is the compromise. For the Dolby Vision movies you own, you could just clone to another disc. For all the others, you can just do one of the passthrough methods I mentioned in my previous reply or play from ISO. Unless you're cool with just making physical copies of all your movies.

To add from what wgk.derdicke said, the "Full Disc" mode is generally used to compress the movie to fit onto smaller discs. It maintains all features of the movies, just like the original, but allows it you to have a smaller output. This is useful if you want to save money on discs or have limited storage. Technically, you could select the same output as the source to. But that defeats the purpose unless you plan to alter the settings. wgkderdicke is also right about the audio data having to be altered for Cinavia removal.

The "Clone/Burn" mode, as wgk.derdicke pointed out, just gives you an exact 1:1 ISO or a cloned disc. You cannot compress or alter the settings (other than decryption) like you can in "Full Disc" mode. This is the best option for maintaining the original quality.