Remember the days before streaming services were a thing? Yep, basically that: as in people would burrow a rented copy from a friend who paid money to obtain a official copy on DVD from blockbuster then ripping the contents into those blank DVDs (the white ones) meaning they’ve pirated a copy for home use but it’s still a “torrent”. I remember watching a ripped copy of Finding Nemo (or other kids movies from that era) when I was younger.

The same with “lending” a purchased copy from a store a friend has proceeding to rip the DVD content onto a blank DVD having a copy. Then there are CAM’s (pirates using a video camera to record the film upon being shown in theaters) usually they do this around the debut (new releases in cinema) by sneaking a camcorder but the footage is shit (I remember back in 2010, I’ve seen Alice in Wonderland via CAM and it sucked due to bad resolution and audio).

  • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    4 days ago

    Kick Ass 2

    I am not lying but it was cam and the person below the cammer was talking and he said something along the lines of “oi mate, shut the fuck up I’m trynna film this, what’s fair is fair right? Shut your fawking mouth.”

    I could not believe what I heard and started laughing.

  • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    6 days ago

    Not a movie, but I pirated the Tomacco Simpsons episode onto a CD. DVD players couldn’t actually play it, but it played the audio in a CD player just fine. I would listen to it when I fell asleep. I was on odd kid.

  • gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    edit-2
    7 days ago

    I remember getting a copy of American Pie 2 off Kazaa or edonkey and it literally being handycamed in a theatre with people laughing and getting up and walking past the camera during the movie

  • null@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    6 days ago

    I got a Downton Abbey movie for a friend. Someone had recorded it from their chair in the theater. Fully handheld.

  • klu9@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    7 days ago

    A download of the Stephen Chow film 回魂夜 (Out of the Dark) (1995) that I got with eMule in the late 00s/early 10s.

    It’s a horror comedy, much of which takes place at night. Meaning it’s dark to begin with. But this copy was an RMVB file, a format developed to show a postage-stamp-size streaming video on a web page in the last days of the dial-up era. The video was so low res and dark barely anything was visible.

    In addition the subtitles were of the shitty, burned-in, let’s-not-bother-paying-a-real-translator type. So I couldn’t see and I couldn’t understand anything 😅

    Still got it on a DVD-R somewhere, though.

  • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    7 days ago

    What’s up with these “Hello fellow pirates” posts with AI seeming language from piefed.social accounts made 2-3 days ago?

  • atthecoast@feddit.nl
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    6 days ago

    The Video-CD had many advantages, you can record on regular CD-R and play on any dvd player. Also, the quality was crap!

  • dkppunk@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    7 days ago

    The very first movie I pirated was Van Wilder when it was new in theaters. It was awful quality and I still have it around here somewhere.

    But I had such a crush on Ryan Reynolds at the time, the quality didn’t matter

  • LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    They were all great quality, although I made them. There used to be a trend where you could buy pirated copies of movies, and they’d have a cheap paper sticker on the disc, they’d be at local markets and stalls on the weekends. They were absolutely abysmal quality. Grainy, colours all oversaturated, lines all through them, super quiet sound. You couldn’t watch them. People would buy them and give them to me. But they were just trash.

    When I was a kid I had a copy box that took off the copywrite protection, on vhs, and I used to tweak the vcr to pile multiple movies on one vhs. It had this system of super fast, skip fast forwarding, where you selected the number of the movie and it zapped to it. I was so young, I cannot remember how it worked. Then I got a computer and downloaded DVD shrink and DVD decryptor. You couldn’t tell the copy from the original.

  • whotookkarl@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    7 days ago

    This is how videos like the church of the subgenuis circulated, replaced pirated VHS copies swapped for some surreal culture jamming dadism stuff.

  • ryokimball@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    55
    ·
    7 days ago

    Friend of mine got one of the Kingsman movies and before the opening credits was what I could only guess was the Russian pirater’s homemade rap video; he was injecting his own ads into the media.