Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

clanker

This makes me feel old lol. I used to pirate VHS tapes and games on floppy disk, where you'd also get a photocopy of the pages of the manual that had the random words that the copy protection asked for. Heck, when I was I kid I remember my dad having pirated Spectrum/Commodore games that were copied from an audio cassette.

Back in the physical media days, libraries also had movies and games. I copied some games that way. Back then a personal copy wasn't considered piracy by law though

Whats with the question + slop essay? This is a bot

You can still do this with a library card.

No, but I did brag to my friends by sending them a picture of some movie that I was watching at the movie theatre. The picture, I took with my foldable phone's VGA camera. Good shit. 🤘

I did. A friend pitched in for a netflix account, back when they'd mail you a DVD or two at a time, and I'd keep a rotation coming in where is rip a disc and drop it back in the mail to await the next in the queue.

Then gamefly came around and I sure the same for PS2 games. 😎

Speaking for myself - generally, no. A couple of reasons why. Even "back then" (early 2000s), files could be downloaded from torrents as needed in glorious 360-480p lol. Locally, illegal movies were easy to obtain as burned DVDs from corner stores / under the counter. I still have bodgy copies of LOTR (obtained in Bali, iirc). My wife OTOH would indeed rent DVDs and burn copies but that was never a thing for me.

Honestly, the culture was different and we used to look forward to going to Blockbuster, Video Ezy etc. Browsing the shelves and actually watching stuff instead of "curating a collection". The hire terms were pretty reasonable (7 days). You could hire something, watch it over the week, and return it. $10 for 2 weeklies and a new release meant a week of viewing.

I remember hiring box sets of 24, Firefly etc like this - never bothered to burn them because there was just too much friction. It's not like now where I can drop a DVD into a dvd burner and have it automagically appear on my NAS and Jellyfin.

I do remember in the 80's and 90's though - we would hire Sega Master System games, unscrew the cartridge, swap out the PCB with one you owned locally (usually Alex the Kidd), return game to store (hires we strictly 1-3 days). That way you play for as long as needed, then "hire" the OG cart back and swap the PCBs back around.

I remember taping songs onto compact cassettes off the radio.

It was hard to push the record button at the right time to cut out the DJ or the previous song.

Then I had to cue up the tape to the exact place, ready to record the next song.

I had the Apex AD-5131, a 3 disc changer/player that was great for VCD and SVCD. Especially because you could go with a higher quality and go for multiple s/vcd's and it would autochange to the next, so clever splitting meant a change of disc at a fadeout wipe.

.... Yes.

I had a MythTV system with an Athlon 700 cpu around 2005 as a DVR and somehow it was a ripping machine.

Using MythTV's built in encoder it could rip a standard feature length DVD to about 800MB in about 45 minutes, so I've got plenty of 2000's DVDs from the local video store on file still. The process was basically, watch movie via MythTVs interface, leave DVD in, select "encode" from the menu in MythTV, and about 45 minutes later, done.

A few years earlier I was putting bulk Looney Tunes cartoons onto VCD for my children, pretty much wore our DVD player out with those discs haha.

Frankly in my opinion it was the value in Redbox, rent something for a buck, copy it, return the original.

an uncle did for me, the whole star wars saga (trilogy and prequels), i was too young back then

I Remember listening to my first mp3 even and being blown away by the sheer quality of a 128kb mp3 over low end sound blaster shitty output compared to home recorded tapes from radio ....

My first CD-Rom burner paid itself, literally, within weeks. Best investment I even done. But after I covered the cost (400.000 lire) I only ever made backup copies of my preferred Linux ISOs for myself, too much perceived risk.

IME, rentals had shit quality, unless you were one of the first few people to rent that movie. Still watchable, mind you, but the software for ripping back then would hang on the mildest errors.

My guess was that most of the high quality torrents back then were ripped by people who bought or stole New-in-box discs, or employees at stores that rented or sold them, an don't forget Screeners.

If we only look at content available on DVD until about the mid 00s still torrenting about the ether today, I'm sure the majority are ripped from rentals. I had friends who basically bled a rental place dry.

I've never pirated rentals before, but there was a guy who got busted at my work for the like. It was at the post office and he had been.. borrowing(?) mail video rentals, taking them home and making copies. He would return them to the mail stream the next day. I'm not sure how the inspectors caught him, but it was rumored he bragged about having hundreds of shows and movies. He never even had a subscription lol.

I didn't have a computer with a DVD drive until around 2006. By then I would just use the free WiFi at the library to pirate whatever I wanted.

My mother was really into this. Got like a special DVD drive for her laptop that she could rip films off of discs with. Didn't really seem like the type who would download a car

Pirating VHS casettes was very common, but I think that pretty much died with the VHS format. Music CDs got ripped a fair bit until car stereos were able to play mp3 format from CDs and later USBs.

I don't think rental DVD ripping was ever common, torrents were already popular by that time and it was easier (and often less issues with quality and formats) to just download already encoded movies.

Yes.

Star Wars: A New Hope and The Office UK. :3

I remember renting PS2 games and then ripping them onto the PS2 HDD using HDD Advance onto my 40GB IDE drive.