How to find free, legal movies on YouTube

YouTube has thousands of full-length movies you can watch free. Some are put there by the companies that own them. Others are bootlegs that will vanish when they're caught. Here's how to tell the difference.

Signs a movie upload is legitimate

• It comes from a channel that posts lots of films and names them plainly, with the real title and year.
• The film is old enough to be in the public domain. In the US, films released in 1930 or earlier now are.
• It runs the full length of the film, not a trimmed or zoomed-in copy.

Signs of a bootleg

• A disguised title, such as the actors' names with no movie name, or odd spelling.
• A mirrored, cropped or zoomed picture (done to fool YouTube's copyright checks).
• A channel with no other films, or one that changes names.

What WhatsOnVideo does

We list a movie only when YouTube marks it as uploaded by a content partner (an official rights holder), or when the film is in the public domain. Our Movies page has 438 of them sorted into shelves: Westerns, comedy, film noir, crime, horror and sci-fi, war, silent classics and more.

Channels with the most films on our list