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Help Tablets and the associated ecosystems

B

b136624

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A while back, I purchased a Sony Z1 tablet. I searched through all the specs at the time and wanted something with an excellent display and solid hardware so I could use it for work and to watch movies on trips. Much to my chagrin, I came to find out that Sony doesn't pay whatever fee to Google to allow the tablet to play movies in HD. To top it off, Sony didn't even have any HD movies offered in their ecosystem. Why offer a great display and no HD movie access? So it has been relegated to the occasional work trip and my girlfriend's college usage.

I have two questions. The first is, what tablets are least impacted by the manufacturer's ecosystem? Amazon's Fire tablets ended up in no pile for their Applesque control when I was last looking.

The other question is: do I need to go through with rooting to get access to other app's HD movie libraries, or is there another way?
 
Can you login to the Google play store? From there you can find many apps to play HD movies. Netflix, Hulu, etc...no rooting needed.
 
A Sony Z1 definitely has Google Play on it, unless it's a Chinese version, so you can buy or rent movies from that, in HD as well. Plus you can install and use Netflix, Amazon, etc. with it.

As for tablets not having any manufacturers own ecosystem and bloat on them, Google Nexus tablets come to mind here. Sony definitely is very much it's own ecosystem, and I suspect it favours their own movies, like Sony Pictures and Columbia Pictures, it's certainly not a walled-garden though. You can watch HD movies from other sources on their devices of course, NO rooting required. :thumbsupdroid:
 
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Gentlemen,

I have access to Google Play, and yes, I can purchase/rent movies. However, I cannot rent HD movies and watch them on the Sony Z1 tablet through Google Play. Let's say, for instance, I want to rent Star Wars: The Force Grows Older. For HD rental it says "Rent HD, Note: HD purchases will play SD on this device. Watch HD on Chromecast, Chrome browser, Roku, and most Android devices." Amazon Video can finally stream HD...ish, I believe, since it is installed outside of Google Play. I tried Hulu and a couple of others back in the beginning. None of them were able to stream HD. I honestly haven't tried recently until now.
 
Android version is 5.1.1. Google Play is up-to-date. I just want to add a note as well. Since part of the reason of getting the tablet was to watch movies during travel, I have to be able to download the movies to play instead of stream. This is where the headache really came in.
 
Can you transfer the movies onto external SD or transfer to internal storage? This option would not work using Google, though. You would need to get the movies from elsewhere
 
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