Correct. If you have to convert from one format to the other, it's going to degrade the quality.

So go get yourself a nice cheap DVD player and stop worrying about it. You may also want to do some more research and make certain the model you buy is region-free (or can easily be made region-free). I have encountered some DVDs that were sourced from standalone DVD recorders, and the resulting filesets were Region 2 instead of 0, so this is a problem to watch out for.