Today there are so many more viewing options available for film fans, compared to just a few decades earlier. You can see a movie at a theater as always, for the best quality; rent DVDs, which is becoming ever more popular with the advent of widescreen TVs and Blu-Ray players; get your DVDs in the mail via companies like Netflix; download movies from the web for a fee; or, you can even download DivX movies for free. This last option is what will be discussed in this article.

DivX is the brand name created by the company DivX Inc. and is a video encoding codec that has become very popular because it can compress video files, which are normally quite large, into a much smaller size while retaining reasonably high quality. Because of the small file size, DivX movies are particularly suitable for sharing in peer to peer networks and downloading without waiting hours for the download to complete.  Peer to peer networks have a very negative reputation among people in the movie industry and the music business because of the problem of piracy, and their ability to avoid prosecution because the network only provides the means to share the files, with the sharers themselves, who are anonymous, being the ones who may be involved with pirating. The software known as Limewire, for example, essentially lets anyone get a free copy of a newly released song for free, yet the music industry has been unable to shut it down. The situation is a little different with movies, because even divX videos, despite the hype, are not nearly as good quality as commercial movies released on DVDs, and even if people are willing to wait the very long time it takes to download a completely uncompressed film, anti-copying technology at least so far has ensured that the amount of full-quality pirated movies available for free is relatively small. Consequently, most film fans still prefer to spend some money to ensure that the movie quality is high.

If you still desire the opportunity to download free DivX movies, quality websites for free. Completely legal downloads include AngryAlien, the Internet Archive, AtomFilms, PublicDomainTorrents, and Emol. Websites containing a mixture of illegal and legal downloading choices include 4Shared, MediaFire, Rapidshare, and MegaUpload. You need to first find the movies in order to download them from these latter websites, and the preferred way  is to make use of search engines that specialize in finding this type of file. Quality search engines of this kind include FilesTube.com, Rapidshare-Search-Engine.com, OneClickFiles,com, and Shareminer.com.