Best set-up for picture quality

[Sarah_UK]

I'm planning to buy Blu-ray discs and then copy them to HDDs. The eventual plan is to play them using an HTPC. I was wondering how the results would compare to a high-end Blu-ray player. Better? Worse? I'm mostly interested in the picture quality and load times.

The way I see it, there must be only two factors - the playback device and the software used for displaying the movie.

As I will copy the movies to my HDD, I don't know how important the BD-ROM on my PC is. Do BD-ROM drives read with errors? If so, then I will need a better one for making the initial transfer to HDD.

Regarding the software, I noticed a very interesting sticky here, comparing different media players, so I'm off to read that now!

Thanks a lot for any advice you can offer.


Sarah