Archive.org

[toef]

I realize this may be obvious to some people, but I can't believe I never really thought of looking into this before, so maybe some others haven't as well.

But anyway, Archive.org has a lot of movies that are now in the public domain, and you can either watch them on the site in the embedded player, or download the file to your computer (most of the movies have 3 different options for codecs and compressions).

Obviously you're not going to find the great new releases here, but if you are interested in film history, there are a lot of must-see's on the site.

Some that I came across (and downloaded) after a minute or two of searching around:

Intolerance
Nosferatu
M
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The General (and other Buster Keaton stuff)

I actually went to the site to see if they had Metropolis -- they didn't -- but came across all this other stuff in the process.

File sizes and quality vary, but these probably look as good as any other way you'll be able to see them. M is 3.5gb, so I imagine that will look pretty good. The others I'm downloading range from 850mb-1gb.

Again, these are only movies in the public domain. It's completely legal.