Many of us like to share content across several devices that we own and often want to watch a video that we have downloaded on our PC on our tablet or mobile device. Sometimes we find that moving media from one device to another is not as straightforward as we would like it to be so here is a rundown of tips and information that should help you to view content across all your own devices.
Digital Video Provider Compatibility Problems
There is a downside to ditching DVD’s and Blu-rays for purely digital content that you download and that is a lack of compatibility across some of the providers or at least some potential restrictions that could affect the quality depending on what medium you choose to watch the video through. Downloading video content from YouTube is not normally restrictive in this way. You should be able to download content using software from the YTD site to your mobile, tablet or PC so that you can view them even when you are offline. Just make sure you remember to respect intellectual property.
Compromise
The train of thought adopted by some people is that if you choose to watch video content online that you have to be prepared to compromise and trade-off a bit of quality for convenience. They have a point in as much that you may well not achieve the top-quality movie experience possible when you are watching on your mobile or tablet compare to using a Blu-ray player but if you want to watch content on the move than you have to be flexible on this point.
Blu-ray movies do sometimes come with a ultra-violet redemption code so that you can download a digital version but even that doesn’t mean that you will end up watching content on your device that is beyond standard definition quality.
Browser limitations
Whilst the prospect of browser-based viewing sounds promising in terms of achieving quality you will find that sites like Amazon stream HD movies you own in 480p SD-Quality, which falls a fair way short of the 1080p HD-quality that is available, although they are hardly going to broadcast that detail in the browser playback window and you have to hunt through the small-print to pick out this information.
The browser viewing option is generally the primary one on offer to most of us and when you select it you can watch your purchased video content through a web browser on your PC although it is not so user-friendly on phones, where logging-in and navigating can be troublesome and a lack of Flash or other plug-in can actually make viewing this way impossible to achieve.
Google doesn’t stream HD content either and even if you are choosing HD quality you will probably still be stuck with 480p by default, so browsers certainly have their limitations.
Downloading suitable video content from the YouTube site should prove one of your less troublesome options and even if you think that the video quality is not as good as you could be getting, the reality is that you are not really losing out on quality because of restrictions, and you have the flexibility to watch your video’s on the move without much hassle getting them on to your device.
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Shane Turney has a passion for the digital world. He especially enjoys blogging about common questions and problems people have when managing their technology and data.
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