Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc | Hacker News Reader

Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc

openculture.com

198 pointspmontra26 comments

As an alternative you can also use https://www.justwatch.com/us/movies?monetization_types=free,... and find a lot of free and legal content in a nice to browse interface.

Disclaimer: I work there

Except for viewers residing outside of the US.

Edit: Ok, I used dewey's link above which doesn't make it obvious you can change the country you're viewing from and then be presented with content for the UK. So for the UK it'd be:

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movies?monetization_types=free,...

To be honest pretty much every movie I tried here was either:

- Free with Amazon Prime (you need a paid subscription)

- Available on BBC iPlayer (you need a paid TV License)

- Available on BFI player (subscription based. Also good luck getting their shitty player to work even on a bog standard Windows 10 OS with Chrome, Firefox or IE - even with every plugin turned off - even NowTV makes a better fist of this, and they still insist on you downloading a separate player if you want to watch on Windows.)

- Free but Ads - mostly provided by tubi.tv which at the moment is unavailable for EU users due to GDPR.

Ok, maybe I could subscribe to a VPN, but meh.

So I kinda think my assertion still stands.

It's also available in a bunch of other countries: https://www.justwatch.com/ - maybe your's is listed too?

See my reply above.

Not sure where your criticism about Amazon Prime comes from. If you select Prime and Free/Ads it doesn't give any results for me. I wasn't aware of the Tubi TV issue, thanks for mentioning it.

https://www.justwatch.com/uk/movies?providers=amz,amp&moneti...

This is a very good website and I find myself using it a lot (especially to compare pricing of streaming movies). I was actually missing something like this and did start building something to help but then I saw justwatch and abandoned my efforts.

One more feature that might be useful would be to show if the movie we are searching for is scheduled to play on a network sometime in the future.

Thanks for sharing, I was looking for a service like that. Looks great. It's a shame I can only register my account via Google or Facebook though :( maybe I'm just dumb, but I can't find any other way to register

What is the point of having a footer on a website with an infinite scroll?

I appreciate the link, but it seems to have the same issue that most of the web suffer from: discoverability and curation.

+1,000 free movies might be great, but with such great numbers I need something more than a list in alphabetical order. As much as we need more content we need better ways to organise and categorise it.

Have had great success using Kanopy (https://kanopy.com). Works with a lot of educational institutions and libraries (notably for me, the New York Public Library).

Second kanopy, love the selection, especially Criterion Collection. (NYPL brought me there too).

I also have access to Kanopy at my local library, but it appears I need to create a Kanopy account in addition to logging into my library system with my library card. I don't approve of turning over PII to a "free" service I've already paid for.

I wonder on what basis these are free. For example, I clicked through to see "Hardware wars", but that video had been taken down due to a copyright claim.

The only site I know is actually open would be https://archive.org/, is this site another clone/fork?

This is basically a link farm.

Some, e.g. Soviet films, are published by actual rights holders.

On top of that, afaik everything made in the USSR before 1970 is uncopyrighted in the west because the USSR didn't take part in copyright agreements (at least Wikipedia's guidelines to finding free images told me this). So, you can watch Eisenstein all you want.

Though I'm not sure if restoration and republishing create new copyright or publishing rights.

Do yourself a favor and try finding a proper screening of the silents, with live music, instead of consuming them on a home system. It's worth the wait.

The best is the enemy of the good.

Or are you saying that the optimal mix is to rewatch Sopranos most of the time and watch a classic silent once per decade?

Basically, yes. There's a finite number of preserved silents and the subset that even gets a screening from time to time is even lower. Paradoxically, the less opportunities you have for proper watching, the more likely it is that you will get one that you have already spoiled on the small screen, because the selection criteria are the same.

As someone who has watched silents with live music I can attest that the experience can be great (or not, depends a lot on musician(s) and music) and you should definitely go for it when given opportunity. However, I completely disagree with the idea that movie will somehow be sullied or even ruined if you watch it first on your own TV.

Except for “Man With A Movie Camera,” which is phenomenal with Cinematic Orchestra's soundtrack. Probably not so free, but it can be found here and there.

Also, it's such an excellent fit in Ninja Tune's catalog.

Unfortunately, a few of the YouTube links have been taken down (e.g. Ivan's Childhood, Hamlet).

Youtube took down their account

Youtube's definition of "infringing copyright" is far wider reaching than the actual legal definition.

YouTube's definition of copyright infringement is "someone claims it is". That's literally it, they are not actually checking the potential infringement (neither claim to do it for that matter).

There are repercussions for failing to take action after a valid claim but none for taking action after a bogus claim. So there is an incentive to take material down fast after any claim but no incentive for due diligence and claim validation before or after the takedown.

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