All OS Confused about deciding on a media consumption device based on actual video size

[raksrules]

I am used to using my travel time in office bus to watch TV shows on a portable device. Until now, I was using Amazon Fire 7 which still works well. Problem with it is that it does not have Widevine L1 DRM which means any official apps I use like Netflix, Hotstar etc don't play anything in HD, it is max 480p only. Even shows downloaded on netflix, each episode of 50 Min is under 300 MB.
And using nPlayer as offline player for my 1080p videos, many a times videos will not play or will stutter (play in slow motion) or get some sort of Codec error (The same videos will play fine in Amazon Fire HD 10 using same nPlayer).

I am planning to replace this with another device which should be more capable but I don't want it to be big in size as I don't want to attract attention (if this was not a factor, I would just taken my iPad or fire hd 10 with me). I am contemplating buying an iPad Mini 5 for this and have a thread opened too for the same but then with Apple iPads, they are having 4:3 screen ratios which is great for general web surfing, magazines and all but for videos, there are usually pretty big black bars. Basically, the videos don't utilize the entire real estate for the actual video. In my Fire 7, entire screen fill up so basically I am getting full 7 Inch worth of video (1080p videos) while I borrowed my neighbor's 2nd Gen iPad Mini to try and measures the actual video and it is actually less than 7 Inch (about 6.8 Inch probably). So, using a 7.9 Inch screen iPad, I get less actual video size compared to a 7 Inch Android tablet.

For people using their big screen phones as media consumption devices, I want to ask if the landscape wide format of phones (tall when you look in portrait orientation) is bothering when watching videos and do videos appear more stretched in landscape than what they should ideally be?

Based on whatever I mentioned above, I am confused as to whether to get some large screen decent brand android device or the iPad Mini (only if I get for max 20K) or something else.

 

[ishanjain28]

> I want to ask if the landscape wide format of phones (tall when you look in portrait orientation) is bothering when watching videos and do videos appear more stretched in landscape than what they should ideally be?

There is usually a setting in most apps for this so you can choose to see small vertical(when holding it in landscape mode) bars instead of stretching it. The aspect ratio isn't as skewed(and generally most new videos are closer to 21:9 than they are to 4:3) so it's not _as_ bad.

If your only use case is watching videos/reading books, S6 lite is excellent. The screen is decent, quad speakers, aspect ratio that is more suited for media consumption. I bought mine(brand new) for media consumption purpose for around ~21k IIRC. (still use air 3 for books/note taking because it's almost A4 size)

 

[raksrules]

> I want to ask if the landscape wide format of phones (tall when you look in portrait orientation) is bothering when watching videos and do videos appear more stretched in landscape than what they should ideally be?

There is usually a setting in most apps for this so you can choose to see small vertical(when holding it in landscape mode) bars instead of stretching it. The aspect ratio isn't as skewed(and generally most new videos are closer to 21:9 than they are to 4:3) so it's not _as_ bad.

If your only use case is watching videos/reading books, S6 lite is excellent. The screen is decent, quad speakers, aspect ratio that is more suited for media consumption. I bought mine(brand new) for media consumption purpose for around ~21k IIRC. (still use air 3 for books/note taking because it's almost A4 size)

Well S6 lite is still more than 10 inch which is too big for my use case. Also if I wanted 10 incher then I already have Fire HD 10 (screen is cracked on side though).