About Nitrate
A streaming front-end for cinema that already belongs to everyone.
Where the films come from
Every film you can play here is streamed from the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library. Its moving-image collections hold tens of thousands of films whose copyright has expired, was never registered, or was deliberately released — the public domain, in other words.
Nitrate stores no video and proxies no streams. When you press play, your browser requests the file directly from archive.org, exactly as it would if you visited the site yourself. What this app adds is a way to find something worth watching.
Why it looks like a real catalogue
Archive uploads are titled by whoever contributed them, which produces entries like TheFastandtheFuriousJohnIreland1954goofyrip. Nitrate cleans each title, searches The Movie Database for it, and scores the candidates before accepting a match — so posters, synopses, genres and cast lists attach to the right film. Where no confident match exists, the Archive's own metadata is shown instead and the film is labelled as unmatched.
What is deliberately absent
There are no pirate embed providers here. Apps of this kind usually pull streams from services that redistribute copyrighted films without permission; Nitrate does not, which is why you will not find last year's blockbusters in the catalogue.
For films still under copyright, the Free elsewhere section lists what is currently free and legal to watch on ad-supported services such as Tubi, Pluto TV, Plex and the Roku Channel, and links out to them.
On the public domain
Public-domain status varies by country and is occasionally disputed for individual titles — a film may be free in the United States while its underlying novel or score remains in copyright elsewhere. Nitrate relies on the Internet Archive's own curation and takedown process. If you believe something here is misclassified, report it to the Archive directly and it will be removed at source.
Credits
- Video & metadata — the Internet Archive
- Artwork, synopses, cast — TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
- Streaming availability — JustWatch, via TMDB