Popcornflix Review

Popcornflix is a free movie website with a number of films in various genres that you can stream right now without having to log into a user account. There are also free TV shows.

I've used this movie streaming site for years. It has changed quite a bit over that time, but I still find myself coming back. Keep reading to see my full review of Popcornflix, including my thoughts on the quality of the videos, the advertisements, the mobile app, and more.

Movies Are Easy to Find... Sort Of

Using the Popcornflix website is really easy. The menu, if you can call it that, is just three buttons along the top of the site. Homepage, Movies, and Series.

On the movies page are all the categories you can look through to find your next film. All Movies is a list of every movie the site carries, but you can also select a genre to find films listed as a comedy, action, thriller, drama, documentary, and others.

The home page is another way to find a free film. It has handy categories like Popcornflix Spotlight that includes general suggestions, and New on Popcornflix and Trending Now which provide a glance at the updates to the site's film collection and what movies people are enjoying right now.

In addition to those sections are specialty genres like War & Military, Creature Features, Adventure Hour, Disasters, and more. These might change throughout the year, depending on surrounding holidays and current events. Around Halloween, for example, I've seen Water Monsters, Classic Horror, Vampires, Ghosts, Halloween Horror Playlist, Frightfully Funny, and other similar themed categories.

One complaint I have, and this is just my personal preference, is the left-to-right scrolling mechanism for looking through the categories. While this does look nice, it's usually more of a bother when compared to a typical list format.

Video Quality Could Be Better

Many of the videos I've tested seem to be around the same quality as a regular DVD movie. The exact resolution of the films is unknown because you can't change the quality from the video, but they're certainly not high definition. With that being said, the movies are not hard to watch by any means.

Video Player Options

The video player is about as bare as possible while still providing the necessities. For a long time, Popcornflix had lots of unnecessary play options, like a GIF maker and timestamped comments. However, it's much more polished now.

You can press one button to restart the movie. There's also a 10-second rewind and fast-forward button to quickly skip back or ahead. The subtitles option lets you choose captions (for some movies) and pick which language the audio should play in. The full-screen button is, of course, to fill your screen with only the video player.

Several Ads Per Movie

While watching a few movies at Popcornflix, you might notice a trend with the advertisements. More often than not, the movies I watch start off with two 15-second or 30-second ads, and then there are more throughout the video.

Every ad is marked with a yellow dot, so you can clearly see when they're approaching and how many the movie will have by the time you're finished watching. As an example, both a 2-hour and a 1.5-hour film I watched had 11 ads each. A show that's less than one hour might have around five ads.

The longer the movie is, the more commercials you'll have to watch, which doesn't seem like a terrible deal. To be able to watch tons of movies absolutely free and only have to watch a handful of advertisements isn't a bad trade-off.

Video Buffering Experience

Some video streaming websites tend to have issues with buffering or loading. Users will sometimes note that videos will begin playing, only to stop midway to finish the buffering process.

I have never experienced issues like this, but you might if you have a slower computer or internet connection. More often than not, those are the reasons for videos that don't stop buffering; not a problem with the service itself.

Popcornflix Has a Free App

Popcornflix has a free movie app that simplifies streaming the site's movies on your phone or tablet. Like the desktop site, you can look through the movie and series collections, search by keywords, and browse by genre.

You can also access this service on your streaming device. There's a Roku channel for Popcornflix and a YouTube channel with some of its full movies.

Something else worth mentioning is that you don't need to log in to watch movies. You can just install the app and start streaming immediately.

Popcornflix: Final Thoughts

With the functional mobile app, a wide variety of free films, and adequate video quality, Popcornflix is one of the better websites I've used that offers free movies and TV shows.

There are certainly some things the service could improve upon, such as the quality of the movies and the methods you're able to use to find something to watch. For example, most movie sites let you sort videos by popularity or release date, and sometimes even rating, but Popcornflix's website simply lists the titles without any sorting options.

All that said, it's still a nice place to visit if you're wanting to avoid paying for films.