YouTube Freebies
Some of the movies for free on YouTube actually have decent transfers, but not all of them—thus our list
by Michael Gaughn
February 7, 2025
I wouldn’t even be wasting space with this if YouTube wasn’t offering up a decent variety of movies, often with surprisingly good transfers, for “free”—and within those quotation marks lies the rub. They’re free with commercials, of course—and ads have become so consistently abusive and offensive that having to suffer through them will be a significant deterrent for a lot of people. But if you can stomach that toxic barrage of interruptions, this can be a good way to check out something you haven’t seen before or don’t feel like forking over the money to watch again.
Why not feature the “free with ads” offerings on Amazon as well? Because their spin on this whole exercise is far more immoral. Movies used to be free on Prime, without an ad in sight. But, in one of Amazon’s endless bait & switches, they went from truly free (with a Prime subscription, that is) to “free” if you both paid the subscription and were willing to be subjected to the ads—and that goes way beyond odious to outright vicious.
To be clear, this is in no way a blanket endorsement of YouTube’s movie offerings, which tend to be all over the map in quality of presentation—with bad low-res transfers, pan & scan versions, and TV edits mixed in with transfers that rival the best available on any service. Thus our wheat-from-chaff list on the homepage—which we’ll be updating often since YouTube frequently swaps titles in and out.
Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtable, marketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.
© 2025 Cineluxe LLC