If you select Music, you can view your purchases by song, artist, or album. If you view by album, click an album to see which songs are available to download. To download an item, click its iCloud Download button. Google does note this when you purchase a video, but that might get overlooked by some. It also has a help page that explains more. Vudu comes out seeming the big winner with full HD streaming in your browser. But then again, this kind of sucked:.
I was trying to watch one of my videos on an external monitor hooked to my laptop. Vudu wanted me to use a cable that supports HDCP copy protection.
Without that cable, it would only give me SD quality. Maybe I have the right cable somewhere, but given I had indeed paid for my content, getting treated like a pirate and not being able to watch my content in HD on the monitor of my choosing didn't make me happy. Mac Download It can be nice to download your video content for offline viewing.
My next category on the chart is whether you can do this on a Mac. Vudu is the only other major platform supporting Mac downloads. Just don't try doing it with Chrome. Vudu will ask you to use another browser. I used Firefox; Safari would probably be fine, too.
Sure -- in fact, all but Google allow this. But there's a gotcha again with Amazon, where when using its Unbox player, HD movies will only be downloaded in SD quality. TV content, however, can be downloaded in HD quality. Amazon also has a restriction that you can only download to two devices. Except it might really be four devices, when you actually start playing with the download options.
And there's no way to deauthorize those devices, other than contacting Amazon support -- which I did through chat. It only took a few minutes, but the whole situation feels confused, and Amazon's page about it isn't much help.
As for Xbox Video, confusingly, its help page says to use the Zune software to download video, with no mention that if you have Windows 8 or Windows RT, this seems unnecessary. You can download Xbox Video content from within the Video application that's native to those operating systems. Also, be warned. Once you start that download in Windows 8, there seems to be no pause option.
No surprise, that's not an issue for those who own Apple devices. They all support this. However, what quality are you getting? I'd never thought to look before doing this testing. When I downloaded from the cloud, nothing on my iPad Retina prompted me about what quality I wanted or indicated what quality I received.
It's probably HD, but it would be nice to easily know that. The Amazon Instant Video app for iOS was surprisingly good, but as with Apple, it's hard to know what the download quality is. Vudu claims to support the iPad, but that's really just supporting playback in the Safari browser. There's no download option for offline viewing.
Some videos are even restricted from playing on iOS. Finally, content you buy on Google Play is made available nicely through the Google's YouTube app, under the Purchased area. None of the other providers supports the Kindle.
I even tried to get Google Play and Vudu content to work through the Kindle's browser but had no luck. No one else does, not even if you try to go to Amazon, Vudu or Google through the phone's browser. As for Xbox Video, the support is pretty poor.
Forget downloading your purchases from the cloud, as Apple, Amazon and Google all allow for their mobile devices. You need to download to your computer, then get a cable, then connect your phone to the computer and transfer using the Zune software.
That worked for my Lumia Windows 7. I tried using the Windows Phone app for Windows 8 as an alternative, but it kept giving an error that my video couldn't be shared. Maybe that's why the Xbox Video download instructions don't mention the app, because it doesn't work. Too bad -- I was left with no way to get my purchased video onto my phone. Surface Given that Microsoft is pushing its Surface tablet hard, I wanted to include it in the roundup.
I looked at Surface with Windows RT, the less expensive model and still the only Surface model shipping at the moment.
The more expensive Surface Pro, which launches next week, is really just a full-fledged Windows 8 computer in a nice package. Whatever a PC can do, it can do. You can't install the Amazon Unbox player, so you can't download Amazon video for offline viewing. There are no apps from others beyond Microsoft that allow for playing or downloading video.
Roku The Roku box is one of my favorite gadgets. I use it almost every night to stream content directly from places like Netflix and Hulu to my TV. It also offers great support for Amazon and Vudu, up to p quality, if you have a higher-end model. Xbox While Xbox Video has no real support outside devices using Microsoft's own operating systems, Xbox itself is pretty open to other providers.
You can buy and view your purchased content from Xbox Video, of course. But you can also access Amazon and Vudu. If you try to access them by saving them as a favorite or to your Watch Later list, they still won't play. But if you want to watch purchased video, your choice is unsurprisingly only iTunes. None of the other providers is an option. Yes, you can get YouTube, but your purchased videos from Google Play won't be listed. Other devices There are many other devices that I haven't covered, perhaps most notably the Wii and the PS3.
I don't own either, so I couldn't test them. And the winner is So who's the winner in all this, the provider that if you buy from allows you the most choice? That's a pretty tough call. It's easy to look at all the 'no's' in the Xbox Video column and perhaps think that's the wrong choice to make.
But if you own an Xbox and a PC, you'll get better quality downloads than Amazon currently allows, despite also being on the Xbox and the PC. Google also may seem a pretty poor choice, when you consider that you can't download to anything but an Android device, and that streaming through the browser is only in SD.
But if you're consuming video primarily through Android devices, Google is going to give you the quality edge over the only alternative, Vudu. If you have several Apple devices, iTunes can make a lot of sense. This thread is archived. New comments cannot be posted and votes cannot be cast.
Sort by: best. Pay attention when you visit movie download sites to ensure you know exactly what you are buying.
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