Best quality for DVD ripping

[chrisreeve]

Good afternoon

I am new to MakeMKV, but I am planning to rip Stargate SG-1 from my DVDs. This is one show that doesnt exist in HD (Seasons 1-6).

Space is not a limiting factor, so I just want to keep the files as they are.

What is the best way to rip them for use in a Plex Media Server? Just run through the DVDs with MakeMKV, and thats it? Or should I use something like Handbrake, which as I understand it, also re-encodes the files?

Again, all I care about is preserving the original quality as well as possible, and make them playable through Plex (which I know they will be if Im using MakeMKV).

[Woodstock]

Just rip them to MKVs and store them on the Plex server. That will give you the best quality you can have, given the source. This applies to BD and UHD, as well - any time you re-encode the video, you lose quality. The question is whether the loss is noticeable.

DVD uses a rather poor encoding (MPEG2), but converting it to h.264 doesn't make it better, just much smaller.

Depending on your playback client, Plex may do re-encoding as well.