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).
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.