Read more of this review to learn how to find free movies and to learn about our experience with advertising and video buffering, among other details.
Some Movies & Shows Aren’t Free
Fortunately, there is a Free section that shows just the free movies. Some genres you can look through are Romance, Classics, Horror, Animation, Documentary, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Comedy, Western, Action, Adventure, Disaster, Indie, and Drama, among several others. You can also apply an MPAA rating filter to show just G, PG-13, PG, R, NR-17, or Unrated movies. It’s nice to see this here, since this kind of filtering is rare to see on free movie streaming sites. Other filters include decade, metascore, and IMDb rating. Something we really don’t like about Yidio is that even after you’ve filtered out the movies that cost, all the remaining films aren’t necessarily free. The service claims that this is the case, but it’s definitely not, so be sure to look carefully, or you’ll end up being prompted to pay for the movie instead of stream it for free. To ensure that a movie is free, you have to go to its description page and find an item that says Totally Free!. If there isn’t one listed, then it’s not free to watch, regardless of it being in the results of the free list. If there is a section for free movies, you’ll either be able to watch the film on Yidio’s website or a link will take you elsewhere for the stream, like to Popcornflix, Vudu, or Freevee. On that note, we’ve run into a few instances where Yidio’s listing of a movie being free was accurate, but the site hosting the movie no longer offers it! So, beyond Yidio wrongly reporting movies as free, sometimes even the real free ones are simply no longer offered, which is a bummer. Yidio’s TV shows are similar to the movies except that it’s much easier to explicitly list just the free shows versus ones that cost. You can select a show by its genre or network, like Syfy, ABC, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, FOX, Lifetime, MTV, National Geographic, Animal Planet, PBS, Disney, and many others. Once a TV show is selected, choose Free from the left pane to be shown websites that host episodes for free. The majority of the TV shows we sampled didn’t have every episode available to watch, though there were many that had several. Popular and newly added movies and shows can be seen by sorting the results list.
Yidio Has DVD Quality Videos
All the movies we tested were hosted on other websites and seemed to be of a high quality.
Yidio’s Player Options
Most of what you’ll find through Yidio is hosted on other video streaming sites, so we can’t compile all of those details here. Most of the video players let you do everything you’d expect: enable subtitles, go into full screen mode, fast-forward and rewind, etc. Sometimes, you can share the video over social media or embed it on your own website.
Ads Are in Every Video
Essentially, every website that offers free movies can do so because they display ads. Giving your attention to advertisements is what pays for the movie, and there’s basically no way to escape that if you’re interested in only free movie streams. Longer movies will have more advertisements than shorter ones, but there are still multiple ads in any video you decide to watch. For example, a few of the movies we watched that were 1 hour 30 minutes long had 8-10 advertisements.
Our Video Buffering Experience With Yidio
We didn’t run across any buffering issues while using Yidio. We tested out several videos and none of them resulted in a random pause or skipped playback. The main reason any video streamed online will have buffering problems is if your browser, computer, or internet connection is slower than recommended, which means the experience will vary from person to person. If you’re having buffering issues with videos, it could also mean that the hosting site is having issues, and not necessarily your own computer or network. Again, though, of the various times we’ve used this site, we haven’t had any difficulties.
Yidio’s Mobile App
Yidio has a dedicated free movie app for watching videos, but because most if not all the content is hosted on other websites, you’ll be told to install those apps to watch the movie. This can get annoying and may seem like a hassle, but it’s actually nice that Yidio provides one place to visit to find free movies from all over the internet. Just like on the website, you can filter the videos by website source and show movies only of a particular MPAA rating. Among other things, you can also filter the films by premiere date and hide ones you’ve already seen.
Final Thoughts
We like Yidio because it’s more useful than most other video streaming websites. Instead of just showing movies and TV shows from one single source, it tells you what many other websites have available as well, and links directly to them. This means you don’t have to spend loads of time searching through other websites for free films and shows. We also like that you don’t have to have an account to search for something to watch. You can open the app or website right now and begin finding tons of free content. Sometimes, though, you may have to provide your date of birth to verify that you can watch a film intended for mature audiences. Some sites might make you log in to their app before you can begin streaming. As we mentioned above, not all the movies Yidio lists as free are in fact free, which means that while the site as a whole is intended to save you time in finding free movies, the fact that you can’t trust the Free filter is disappointing. With that being said, it’s still a great platform for putting tons of movies and TV shows together in one place. If you have to select a few movies only to find that they aren’t actually free, we think using Yidio is still worth it considering much of the content is indeed free.
