this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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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.
Yep! I saw and rewatched tons of movies this way as a kid. We had two VCRs and my stepdad copied most of what we watched for a handful of years, but I can’t remember when exactly it started. We had Road House on a copied tape, so it was likely in the early 90s.
He also had some copied Betamax tapes from the 80s too, so he was a pretty early adopter of piracy. I first saw Labyrinth on Betamax!