Yidio is a unique website to offer free movies because, in addition to hosting its own content, it also shows you where to go to watch other free movies and TV shows on the Internet.
Read more of this review to find out how to find free movies, and to read our experience with ads and video buffering, among other details.
Some movies and shows are not free
Since Yidio brings together films from Amazon, Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Vudu and other sources, not all movies on the website are free: some require a one-time payment and others require a subscription to the service.
Fortunately, however, there is a free section.totweet from the site that shows only the free movies. Some of the genres you can search for are Romance, Classics, Horror, Animation, Documentary, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Comedy, Western, Action, Adventure, and Drama among several others.
You can also apply a sort filter to show only R, PG-13, PG, G, NR, or NR-17 films, which is a unique feature that I haven’t found on many other movie streaming websites. Other filters include decade, metascore, and IMDb rating.
One thing I really don’t like about Yidio is that even after we’ve filtered out the movies that cost, all the remaining movies aren’t necessarily free. Yidio claims that this is the case, but it is definitely not.
To find free movies on Yidio, you have to, unfortunately, click on the movie and search for a title bunder the cover image that says Totally free!. If none are listed, then it’s not free to view, regardless of whether it’s in the free list results.
Yes there are a free movies section, you will be able to watch the movie on the Yidio website or a link will take you to another place to watch the movie, like Popcornflix, Vudu or IMDb TV. There is even a part of the Yidio website dedicated to showing you free movies on Netflix.
Yidio’s TV shows are a bit similar to movies, except that it’s much easier to make an explicit list of free shows versus paid ones. You can select a TV show by its genre or channel, such as Syfy, ABC, Nick, NBC, Disney Channel, Comedy Central, Lifetime, USA, A&E, HBO GO, AMC, TLC, or History and many others.
Once you have selected a TV program, you can choose Free Sources in the dropdown box to display the websites that host the episodes for free, which is usually the website of the channel that originally broadcast it.
Most of the TV shows I tried to watch from Yidio did not have all the episodes available to watch, although there were many that did have several.
The videos popular and the newly added they can be viewed from the Yidio home page.
Yidio has DVD-quality videos.
All the movies that we tested on Yidio and that were hosted on the Yidio website were of standard quality, very similar to that of a DVD.
Some of the movies and TV shows that were linked to others sites Weband not with Yidio’s, seemed to be of superior quality.
Yidio Player Options
There aren’t many specifically cool features of the video player for movies hosted on Yidio’s own website, as can be found on other movie streaming services. Instead, like Popcornflix, there’s a volume rocker, a full screen button, and the ability to rewind and fast-forward the video.
However, there is also a handy button that you can click to rewind the video 10 seconds. This is useful if you want to see what you just saw again but without having to use the video debugger.
You can also share the video via Facebook or Twitter and copy the link from incrustation if you want to embed the video on your website.
There may be more video playback options like Subtitle for movies and TV shows that are hosted on a website other than Yidio’s.
Ads are in every video
Probably every website that offers free movies can only do so by using display ads, and Yidio is no different.
Longer movies will have more ads than shorter ones, but there are still plenty of them on any video you decide to watch. For example, some of the hour-and-a-half movies we watched had between eight and ten commercials.
However, we didn’t find any of Yidio’s ads overwhelming and none of them lasted long, which is good.
My experience with video buffering with Yidio
We didn’t run into any buffering issues while using Yidio.
The main reason why any video streamed online will have storage issues on the buffer is if your browser, computer or Internet connection is slower than recommended, which means that the experience will vary from one person to another.
If you’re having buffering issues with videos, it could also mean that the website of Yidio is having problems, and not necessarily your own computer or network. Though, again, out of the several times we’ve used Yidio, we haven’t had any difficulty.
The Yidio Mobile App
Yidio has a dedicated free movie app for watching videos, but since some of the content is hosted on other websites, sometimes you will be prompted to install another app to watch the movie on your device.
This can be annoying and may seem like a bummer, but it’s actually a good thing that Yidio offers one place to go to find free movies from all over the internet.
Just like on the website, you can filter videos by website source and show the movies only of a certain MPAA rating. Among other things, you can also filter movies by release date and hide the ones you’ve already seen.
Yidio: Final Thoughts
We like Yidio because it is more useful than most other video streaming websites. Instead of just showing the movies and TV shows that Yi hostsdio, tells you what many other websites have available too, and links directly to them, which means you don’t have to spend a ton of time searching through other websites for movies and free programs.
We also like that you don’t have to have an account to watch videos. you can open the application or website right now and start finding tons of free content. Sometimes, however, you may need to provide your date of birth to verify that you can view a film intended for a mature audience.
As we mentioned earlier, not all movies that Yidio lists as free are actually free, which means that while the site as a whole is meant to save you time when it comes to finding free movies, the fact that you can’t trust in the Free filter is disappointing.
That said, it’s still a great platform.rma to gather tons of movies and TV shows in one place. If you have to click on some movies only to find out that in reality are not free, we think using Yidio is still worth it considering that much of the content is actually gratuitous.
