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).
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.