No idea what "shortcut" means.
Anything that simply treats the bits as a stream without regard to potential errors.
If there's one thing I've learned since I first started copying CDs in 1999, it's that it's as much art and black magic as science. I've had CDs that would play perfectly in a normal player but confused a computer. I've had at least three with skips in multiple standalone players but that were willing to copy cleanly via computer. I can't count how many CDs would refuse to read cleanly in one drive but would work perfectly in another.
I gave up trading after too many clicks, pops, missing sections, repeated sections, etc. It's possible to create 100% bit-perfect copies, but few were willing to do so while many were willing to pollute the trading pool with bad copies.
We use FLAC now for archiving due to its smaller file size and tagging functionality. But before FLAC there was Shorten, which also created smaller files but--at least in the circles I ran in 20 years ago--existed more to avoid the errors that were so common with CDDA copies.
I'm very grateful that we now have AccurateRip and the Cue Tools database to prevent or identify or even fix errors, but unfortunately there's still 20+ years of junk out there. In fact, I just within the last hour finally listened to an Iggy Pop show that was clearly copied by someone who Just Didn't Care.
Fortunately, DVD is unlike CDDA in that it's a 100% data format with all the error correction that implies. It's much, much simpler to get a perfect 1:1 copy of a DVD than it ever was with CD. Unless, as also used to happen, traders would create copies via standalone DVD recorders, introducing generational loss as well as eliminating menus and destroying chapters.
I've still got a box of discs under my desk that I swore I'd some day attempt to un-trash, but in my fifth year of retirement it still hasn't happened.
