First off it's Blu Ray not Blue Ray. Second why would you want to do this? Is your whole movie library on blu already?? That's the only reason why you would want to do this. Your not going to see any difference in quality in your iPhone. I bought a standalone Blu Ray player to play movies at home on a 60" HDTV to get more of a theater response from my AV equipment....why would you want to watch it on an iPhone
If you're going to be pedantic, be correct.
It is properly "Blu-ray Disc". Note the dash, and the lack of capitalization on the word "ray".
Why would someone want to do this? Perhaps because they bought a movie on Blu-ray, and *ALSO* want to watch it on their iPhone? I have most of my standard-definition DVD library ripped so that I can watch it on my computer/iPod/iPhone; and I know that
I would like to do the same for my HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc library. (Just purchased my first Blu-ray Disc last week.) Of the 30 high-definition discs I own, only five are duplicates of standard definition discs. And of those five, two were purchased specifically because the standard definition disc was scratched.
So I have 25 movies solely on an HD format.
Now to answer the original poster's question:
MakeMKV can rip a Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD to your hard drive in Mac OS X. You do need a Blu-ray drive, but any external drive will work fine. (Or, if you have a Mac Pro, you can replace the internal DVD±RW drive with a Blu-ray drive.) This is large. One 'small' HD DVD I ripped comes in at 10 GB; a large Blu-ray can be nearly 50 GB. The amount of time this takes is solely dependent on the speed of your Blu-ray drive and hard drive. Takes 15-30 minutes on mine. One minor caveat: Blu-ray Discs that use "BD+" are *NOT* supported on Mac OS X. So older Blu-ray discs should rip fine; but newer ones may have issues.
One report says that "Rambo II" works fine; but "Street Kings" does not. The MakeMKV forums have
a list of movies that do not work.
Then use
HandBrake to convert the ripped .MKV file into something your iPhone can play. The amount of time this takes is dependent on your processor speed. On a PC with a 3.2 GHz Core i7, this took 20 hours to transcode a three hour movie to HandBrake's "AppleTV" preset. I shudder to imagine how long it would take on the single-CPU 1.5 GHz G4 I use to transcode standard definition DVDs.
I am now wondering if a bluray rip to iphone encode will look better than a dvd rip to iphone encode. My instinct is telling me no. HOwever I'd still like the ability to rip bluray but encode to 720p for computer viewing.
Assuming the Blu-ray Disc was made from the same print as the DVD, they should look pretty darned equal. I have seen HD movies that are made from significantly better prints than a DVD, irrespective of the HD nature, which would make for a better picture, though.