This was during an era where VHS was standard and DVD’s were just brand new at the time (before streaming sites existed). Chains like Blockbuster were booming back then with people renting movies or even TV shows for a fee but have to return them by an expected date, what happens is that in order to “keep” a copy, people would use a PC with disc burning software to burn the contents from that DVD onto a blank one.
Know those blank white DVDs? Basically those were used on storing a “pirated” disc for themselves before returning the rented copy back at the video rental store. When I was a kid, I remember encountering what clearly a pirated copy of The Prince of Egypt (so who ever pirated it kept the rented copy) since the disc art is crappy & low quality (it’s been printed then glued onto a blank DVD used for copying upon peeling it off).
Where I lived not very common, it was more common in the 80s. I still remember my friends not believing I had already seen E.T., yet I did thanks to “Video Studio Leo” where I grew up, in Haarlem. Betamax rulez.
staying at my friends relatives house for the weekend was pretty awesome because they had a “black box” cable hookup and you heard about it but rarely saw it.
in fact thats how i saw bash at the beach 96.
some had copy protection but some vcr’s would ignore it so you could copy it anyways. but often the tapes from the rental store were poor quality, so copying it would make no sense, even for effectively “free” (remember you needed two vcr’s to do this, not a common thing at all at the time)
honestly wasn’t worth it. in the 90s you either had enough money to get one of those dual VHS recorders or you had two VHS players that you somehow wired up to each other to do it. you still had to pay for the blank tapes so I mean you’d rent a tape for like $3 but you’d be spending more just to have a copy of it. In many cases it was just cheaper to either record from a tv broadcast or just wait for the rental place to take the product off the shelf and sell it used.
and even when DVD-Rs came out that was still expensive. The blank discs weren’t cheap and the drive itself was expensive. Add to the fact that burned DVDs just don’t last anywhere near as long as pressed DVDs. I thought I was smart burning Dreamcast games but I’d end up having to reburn them every couple years. THEN consider the fact that many people just simply didn’t know how to burn DVDs correctly so good luck getting one to play on everyones player perfectly.
Blank dvds weren’t common to store pirated movies from rental.
If you did you ripped the whole DVD with software but only copies the movie, I remember doing that with my Star Wars DVD and my PSP.
But the software was pricey and the hardware even more so.
It was more common to record onto a blank VHS, but on demand video wasn’t much of an idea at the time and for the cost especially for how cheap dvds were it was cheaper to just by than pirate.
Format shifting like getting that 1 dvd of Family guy on your iPod was more important at the time.
Piracy was more focused on reducing your TV price by getting the codes from Dish Satellites, especially if you were Canadian getting US TV
You could rent a read-only deck from the place we usually went to. It served us well.
It was surprisingly common, though due to the cost of buying tapes, it wasnt as common as it is now.
VHS tapes have this nifty feature where you could store video on it in 3 different formats. While the tape from the rental place was stored in the format that fit roughly 2hrs on a tape, you could record three 2he movies to a tape if you used the lower quality EP format (I think that was the acronym).
This lead to people like my friend’s dad keeping shelves of tapes with hastily a scrawled labels on them for 3 different movies or 6 different episodes.
All you needed for any of this was 2 VCRs, which from the early 90s were pretty affordable.
I can’t speak for others but for myself basically zero.
Because the rental cost of non new releases was so low it hardly made sense for movies I would only watch once or twice a year. In addition due to the frequent replaying on cable of many movies that would further reduce my need to pirate.
Piracy for me has almost always been a service or availability problem.
…… when CSS was not styles on a web page.
I mainly remember my aunt taping marathons and stuff off live TV (trying NOT to record the commercials by pausing the recording during them)
free preview hbo was my jam; recorded black sheep and tommy boy; and our tv was one where you had to record it at max level and the vcr would record all of the on screen stuff from the cable box. so i was absolutely meticulous NOT to touch the remote while recording.
sigh. i wish i still had all the tapes i recorded now.
It was waaaaay cheaper to buy a… mmmm… lesser quality movie on a Betamax cassete than renting one and have to pay late fees, or rewind fees. Ah, and in case a “new” release came, you could just ask your provider to get it next week.
You could also bring back your cassette, and get another movie for cheaper.
VHS? DVD? Get off of my lawn!!!
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Yeah I’d rent things and copy. But blank VHS tapes or DVD-R discs were definitely not free.
With VHS, you had to own two VHS players, one to play and one to record and they were kind of semi luxury items, at least early on, and analog copying significantly reduced quality so it often wasn’t worth it.
With DVD, one DVD player can be just a player and one a read/writer. And writers and discs were very expensive and until later, the discs were write once. So, of it fails part way, you waste a disc. Also, the encryption on DVDs was an issue for a while, but the key was cracked and eventually software became common. Though the DMCA made it illegal to bypass the encryption with pretty significant penalties even for a single one whereas VHS there were just laws relayed to copying that have less possible penalties than bypassing encryption, despite those FBI warnings.
But, yeah, every time I rented something I liked I would try to copy it when I had the hardware to do it. And when Netflix started, I copied a lot of those DVDs before returning them.
It was not free. You rented for a price, then returned the VHS. The longer you kept it, the more you paid.
My grandma recorded a few thousands of VHS, but she aimed at an historical collection so that was all from the television, dubbing existing VHS needed more equipment and was. Not that easy.
We had a VHS camcorder that didn’t have the anti copy channel on its play head. So you could record commercial VHS with the scrambl copy protection right to any connected VCR. I think at even had S-video for higher quality, but I may be wrong. It’s still in my moms attic because I wouldn’t let her throw it away 7-8 years ago.
But also during the Netflix DVD era I ripped 100s of movies and tv series.
The drives are all dead by now though because burning them to DVD took too long.
That was Macrovision, which was a signal inserted into the top few frames that weren’t shown on a TV, but which the VCR used to calibrate its black level. I designed a box which removed them so I could make copies of stuff. It was a bit pointless with hindsight, because I very rarely watched the copies I made. I think the enjoyment of getting one over on the man was far more than actually watching the films.
When I was a kid in the 90s, my dad had a video tuning device that could change the color balance and make other adjustments on live video. It also had the “bonus” feature of stripping the copy protection from live video! He just put that between two VCRs, and we could copy pretty much anything. Being analog, there was still the occasional tape which wouldn’t work for some reason. Without stripping the protection, the second tape would just wind up with an unintelligible mess recorded on it. So I wouldn’t say it was super common, since most people didn’t know these devices were available or where to get them, but I also wouldn’t say it was super rare since it wasn’t particularly hard to set up or use.
As DVD became common, piracy became a lot easier, since everyone had a computer at that point, and you just needed the right free software to bypass the copy protection. My father in law built a huge movie library by ordering DVDs from Netflix (when they were still a DVD by mail business), ripping, and returning them. As for myself, I had gotten into filesharing by this time, so I never did much DVD ripping since the internet was doing the work for me.You didn’t need anything that fancy. You could build a Macrovision remover circuit. The schematics were certainly harder to find before the web, but you could build one up in an afternoon with parts from RadioShack.
