this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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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).

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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 4 points 3 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.

[–] ryokimball@infosec.pub 31 points 5 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 21 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] Narendra_vijayan@lemmy.zip 19 points 5 days ago

Asking the right questions

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[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 28 points 5 days ago

Ok this is a whole story.

So back in the 90s, my mum's friend came back from working in Kuwait for a few years.She gave us a bunch of pirated disney movies. These were cams, but camcorders from the 90s. The video quality was terrible, and several had ads all through them for some burger place like their equivalent of burger king. The ads had some guy dressed in Saudi style robes and turban watching his burger get eaten by an invisible genie or something.

One of the films was Beauty and the Beast. Seeing it now, it's like a whole different movie. As a kid, it was gritty, darkly lit the whole time because of the shitty camera, and because of that it had this severely oppressive horror feel to it. It also didn't have any ads. As kids, that was one terrifying movie. There was no Disney brightness and joy. Just darkness.

[–] notalannister@fedinsfw.app 21 points 5 days ago

When I and my sister were kids, dad brought home a pirated VHS of the Sixth Day with Schwarzenegger. CAM quality shit but the worst part is that whoever was pirating the movies was using recycled VHS tapes... Porn VHS tapes, so after the movie ended there were like maybe 10 seconds of static and then just hardcore porn.

[–] gnuplusmatt@reddthat.com 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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

[–] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 days ago

eDonkey. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

A long time.

[–] joshg253@fedia.io 16 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Return of the King [2003] cam Xvid while it was still in theaters. A nearly 3.5-hour film compressed enough to fit on a 700MB CD or two.

[–] Triumph@fedia.io 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] joshg253@fedia.io 4 points 4 days ago

Something super tiny like that, yeah. It was nasty! :D

[–] klu9@piefed.social 6 points 4 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.

[–] one_old_coder@piefed.social 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

When I wanted to learn Polish, I obviously downloaded Star Wars in Polish because it should be fun. I had a shitty connection and it took me 4 days to download everything (like, oh it's all the movies in uncompressed Full-HD grab your pop corn).

I discovered that they use lektors in Poland, people who speak in the most boring way on top of the English dialogues. You can hear the original audio in the background, which makes it worse. I deleted everything in less than 10 seconds.

[–] klu9@piefed.social 4 points 4 days ago

My first experience with lektors (thanks for teaching me the name!) was years ago with a season of M*A*S*H I got from P2P: one guy droning on in Russian over all the original actors' voices. So I thought it was something exclusive to Russian pirate media! I mean, no one in their right mind with a legitimate licence to release media would put out something that shit , right??? 😆

Fortunately those files came with a secondary audio track that did not have the boring Russian guy droning over the actors, so I didn't have to suffer through it.

But then last November I tried to watch (legitimately, not pirately) a Russian film, the action movie Одиночное плавание (The Detached Mission) (1985) and got... a lektor speaking over the dialogue. I resisted the urge to commit murder for 10 minutes (I really tried to give it a chance) before I quit in absolute rage at the boring f%&king c%nt talking over everyone!!! 🤣

To add insult to injury, the lektor was talking in Russian over characters who were speaking in English, so I had to read the English subtitles just to understand what English-speaking characters were saying!

My experience detailed here: https://piefed.social/c/fullmoviesonyoutube/p/1514124/full-movie-odinochnoe-plavanie-the-detached-mission-1985

The fact that there are countries in the free world today that still perpetrate this crime against humanity makes me want to cry! Give me subtitles or give me dubbing: anything but a f&%king lektor! 😆

[–] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago

Damn, reading that article... Lektors are not everywhere in Eastern Europe. Hungary in particular prides itself in using very high quality dubbing, in so far as having talent agencies and academies for dubbing.

One of the biggest prides is The Flintstones, which was dubbed in the 60s during the height of socialism, where everything western was frowned upon. More about it here.

[–] null@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

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

[–] RedCarCastle@aussie.zone 10 points 5 days ago

Haha memory unlocked, it was the first transformers movie, it started off perfectly, clean picture, good audio, but by the end of it we had been treated to about 6 different versions, form camcorder out of the movie theatre with people moving around, different languages and sub titles, was an experience lol

[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

Pokémon: The First Movie (1998), which I had downloaded with Kazaa, turned out to be a Pokémon hentai ripoff, which my parents got to before I had a chance to come home from school. I walked in on mom and dad sitting in front of the computer, trying to act intrigued at what they're watching. Possibly trying to justify why their child is into Pokémon porn. I did my homework and helped doing the dishes that day. Can you believe that?

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[–] JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Now You See Me. I don't know if it was intentional by the uploader, but it was completely "out of order". The video played fine, but all of the scenes were mixed up, so we were really confused. It happened on scene cuts though so it wasn't totally obvious and at first we thought it was just some sort of weird editing technique because of the subject of the movie.

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[–] atthecoast@feddit.nl 3 points 4 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!

[–] quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I couldn't watch more than 10 minutes of it. It was a CAM that you could hear coughs, laughs, people talking to each other.

[–] Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 days ago

The full cinema experience at home, for free!

[–] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 6 points 5 days ago

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

[–] Zoop@beehaw.org 6 points 5 days ago

When the first 50 Shades of Grey movie came out in theaters, my friends who went to see it were discussing how hilariously terrible it was. I love watching awful garbage like that for funsies, so I torrented it. It took forever because of my shitty connection.

When I was finally able to watch it, it just made no sense. But not at all like how a bad movie makes no sense. It felt like it was skipping around. I was so confused.

After some web searches, I realized that I think I somehow got my hands on some weird, badly-censored Chinese copy where they just cut out anything remotely saucy. Which was most of the movie, hence it not making any damn sense.

I still haven't seen the actual movie, since I just never bothered to try again, but that experience was pretty entertaining.

[–] BigTurkeyLove@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

A Serbian Film.... don't watch it. You have been warned.

[–] remon@ani.social 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (4 children)

Yeah, I've read the plot summary ... that one shall remain unwatched forever.

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[–] Mothra@mander.xyz 6 points 5 days ago

The Catwoman starring Halle Berry. Not only I found the movie sort of lame, also the quality of it was... Well. Someone went to the cinema and filmed the projection with a hand held camera. The image quality was trash, but the camera moved all the time, occasionally shaking. You got to hear the occasional cough or candy wrap noise from the audience, you got to see people standing up and moving across the camera because they needed a toilet break. You get the idea.

[–] exaybachae@startrek.website 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well, I originally saw both Blair Witch and H20 played from really dark and messy VHS copies of theater recordings.... And man, let me tell ya, they were both way better as low quality cams that HD movies!

I intentionally watch bad Horror as cams now, when I can, even decades later... It really adds to the experience!

[–] luthis@lemmy.nz 3 points 5 days ago

For this exact reason I got the VHS rips of Alien 1 & 2 off archive.org.

That is going to be a great watch one spooky night.

[–] SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 5 days ago

The Dark Knight Rises. I was in middle school, and my someone had told my parents that it was extremely violent. Anyway, my cousin had a pirated copy, so I watched it at his place. We could literally hear people chomping on popcorn, and see moving heads lol.

[–] TwodogsFighting 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

It was fairly good quality, but Morbius.

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[–] BeigeAgenda@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I remember buying a VCD of some movie around 2000 and then 20 minutes in, I see the outline of someone getting up and walking out of the cinema the cam release was recorded in! I quit watching and from there on I only go for quality rips.

[–] klu9@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago

Got a few pirate VCDs in the late 90s to play on the Philips CD-i with FMV chip, like The Replacement Killers. Fortunately they were pretty good quality.

[–] nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I bought a film DVD from a local shop (pirated, of course) and 2 songs and a few minutes before the interval didn't play properly, probably due to the disc being scratched or something.

If you're wondering, "songs?"... It was a Bollywood film. We had a lot of songs in films. Now a days, there's like 3 or 4 songs, ~3 minutes each. Up to around 2010, especially in the 80s and 90s films used to have 8-10 songs, some even 5-6 minutes long.

[–] MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I remember the first Bollywood movie I watched, back in the 80s. I was home from a late shift, and it was on TV. I started watching and was still watching like three hours later. Loads of singing and dancing, also an intricate plot that switched from thriller to family drama to romance to murder mystery to political intrigue and back to romance. With fireworks instead of kissing. It was fantastic.

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[–] orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts 3 points 5 days ago

I got the screener of Signs before it came out in theaters. It was a solid copy, despite being a meh movie. DVD quality, had the red band that would scan diagonally across the image every few minutes, not a shitty cam.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 days ago

The new Naked Gun was really bad and not funny at all. It was torture to watch.

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