Keep reading to see our review of Popcornflix—for our 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 page. Homepage, Movies, and Series. Selecting Movies reveals 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 has several handy categories to help you find your next film. Popcornflix Spotlight includes general suggestions, and other categories, like New on Popcornflix and Trending Now, provide an easy 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. One complaint we have, and this is just 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 we tested seemed 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, you start off with two 15-second or 30-second ads at the very beginning of the movie, and 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 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. We didn’t experience any 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 program 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 that offer 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 a movie to watch. For example, most movie sites let you sort the videos by popularity or release date, and sometimes even rating, but Popcornflix simply defaults to an alphabetical listing and doesn’t let you change it. All that said, it’s still a nice place to visit if you’re wanting to avoid paying for films.
