How to get free movies to watch online

Posted by jennycooper on April 19th, 2014

Watching movies from your computer has never been easier with the advancement of streaming technology. Streaming means listening to music or watching a video in “real time”, instead of downloading a file to your computer and watching it later. With internet videos and webcasts of live events, there is no file to download, just a continuous stream of data. There are tons of websites that have free movies to watch online and TV shows, however, it can be a challenge to find websites that offer free movies online to watch in high quality formats.

While enjoying the free movies to watch online option given by your favorite streaming site, do you know how streaming actually works? Streaming is a relatively recent development, because your broadband connection has to run fast enough to show the data in real time. Files encoded for streaming are often highly compressed to use as little bandwidth as possible. If there is an interruption due to congestion on the internet, the audio will drop out or the screen will go blank. To minimize the problem, your computer or laptop stores a “buffer” of data that has already been received. If there’s a drop-out, the buffer goes down for a while but the video is not interrupted. If there is no more data in the buffer, it will usually stop and display a message – “buffering” - while it catches up.

But, as mentioned before, sometimes it can be extremely hard to find free movies online to watch in a high quality format. And this happens because streaming a video actually takes up bandwidth on the website, and as such, high quality videos will take up more bandwidth than low quality ones. The .divx format is typically used to stream online movies in high quality; however, this format requires a special DivX player to be downloaded and installed on the computer. Many sites that offer free movies to watch online will provide the movies in standard video formats, such as .avi, .mov, and .mpg. These are your typical video formats that can be found on almost any website that offers free movies online to watch. These standard formats are so common that it can be difficult to find a video that is not one of these formats. 

When you have the option of free movies to watch online, without downloading anything, you also reduce the risk of getting a virus or other malicious piece of software on your computer. It also saves hard drive space because downloaded movies tend to take up to multiple gigabytes of storage capacity. Some websites that have free movies online to watch might also put up a download link to allow a person to download the movie to his or her hard drive to watch whenever he or she wants. This is useful for people who use laptops and want to be able to access the movie on the go without an Internet connection. 

Websites that stream online movies are a stepping stone to the future. As more and more computers, and people, gain access to the Internet, the popularity of movies that can be streamed online will rise.

Resource Box: If you want to get some free movies to watch online all you need is a good internet connection and a little bit of time on your hands. A nice website that offers these services will have a wide variety of free movies online to watch; so you can pick your favorite, lay back and enjoy your day!