I didn't buy the Nexus to play 1080p files.
But you're right on the tablet front, expandable storage is a necessity for tablets. The Tab 8.9 I picked up, which is a first tier tablet despite its age, only has 16GB of storage. And that gets filled up very quickly when loading it with 720p videos. Still, it supports external flash memory via an adapter. Works quite well, though its more of a pain than just having storage on the device.
The summer's high end Android tablets better all have expandable storage, given then they'll all have 1080p screens and the processing power to play HD video at that resolution.
The cheapo Chinese tablets are not representative of Android and you should have been aware of that before you bought one. Its a little dishonest of you to return it knowing this. You get what you pay for.
I specifically asked if NTFS was supported and was told that it was.
It turns out this was false. The guy who told me this has the exact same model tablet, and swears his drives are NTFS. So either he's just mistaken, or else his build of Android has the NTFS support added by the manufacturer. He'll check again, but either way it's irrelevant because my specific tablet I got does not support NTFS.
Actually I'd prefer exFAT over NTFS, since my Macs have read/write support for exFAT, but as a last resort I'd even accept ext3 support.
BTW, which tablets support NTFS (or exFAT)? I understand that the Asus Transformer Prime does. I'm not interested in a 10" tablet though. (And rooting doesn't count.)
I don't store two versions. I only have one 1080p version. When I transcode, it converts the video on the fly while streaming. When I'm done watching the movie, there isn't a second file left over.
Here's a wiki on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcoding
This doesn't help for me. I have no use for streaming my videos at home. I watch movies on my projector or my TV. I need local storage on the tablet for use on the road.
Anyways, I think I'll just use one of my laptops until the state of the Android tablet union improves.