…we bought our first VHS player in the late seventies, when very few films were released on videocassette and the MSRP for commercial films was around $360 (inflation-adusted to 2026), so everyone’s libraries pretty much comprised bootlegs and television broadcast recordings…those old tape-trading networks (which my mother called the ‘black market’) promulgated notoriously-sketchy multi-generation copies by modern standards, but the novelty of watching hollywood films at home was so profound that nobody gave much consideration to recording artifacts compromising the video quality…

…that huge expense for commercial releases pretty much built the video-rental market in the early eighties, and it wasn’t until the advent of ‘priced to own’ films in the late eighties (around $50 inflation-adjusted to 2026) that people began collecting legitimate commercial releases for their home library, creating a huge new market which transformed the film industry as profoundly as did cable television fifteen years earlier and streaming fifteen years later…

The most common I remember (I was like 5 at the time) was to go to the video rental store and rent a bunch of movies on VHS. You’d also rent a VHS player. You take the rental VHS player home and cable it to your existing VHS player. While one is playing the movie, the other is recording. Quick way to get a massive library of movies all named with sharpie markers and those little VHS stickers.

The real question is how many times you write over that movie and have to cross out what it was because you obviously can’t be bothered to go and buy more VHS tapes.

Late '80s. We would coordinate who would buy which cassette album and then go to the person’s house with the best “dub” deck and make copies. There was 2x and maybe even 4x copy speed but the quality would suffer. Usually good enough for our shitty car stereos though. 90 minute tapes could normally get an album on each side. IIRC the high quality blanks were about $1.50 each if you bought a 10 pack. $8 for a tape of a regular band or something older like Led Zepplin, $12 for a brand new hit album.

Making mix tapes for your crush was HUGE at the time. Hey, if I can’t write poetry at least I can make her a cassette of love songs, right?

My experience is more late 80s, early 90s as a kid/teen. We recorded tons of stuff on VHS from cable TV and shared with friends and it was extremely common. It’s similar to how people use DVRs only you end up with a more portable copy if you want to share it. DVRs took away that sharing capability on purpose to increase cable and streaming revenue. Sure VHS was lower quality, but at that time cable wasn’t great either and HD TV’s and content weren’t common. Cams from movie theaters just wasn’t realistic and theater was still about the experience way more than it is now with everything just extra loud and flashy if you go to one.

I also copied stuff on cassette to share or to make it more portable since I had a cassette walkman. Sometimes that was from radio, but that was harder since you didn’t have a guide to what was coming up. Either you had to sit there and hope a song played that you wanted and then rewind if it wasn’t one. Or you had to copy from one cassette to another and further lose quality with analog copying. More common was making mix tapes either from original purchase cassettes or CDs once I had a CD player. Then BMG and copycats came along and everyone cheated the free trials to get a ton of free music before torrenting came along later.

Psst, torrenting was invented in 2001. Back in the old days of which you speak it was entirely sneakernet (sometimes you’d rent the mail’s sneakers).

“Torrents” doesn’t mean “piracy,” it means the bittorrent p2p protocol specifically. If you download something today off Usenet it’s not torrenting.

Of course I know them. It was me.

I had a stereo with the double vcr setup. I’d rent movies and copy my favorites.

Back then you wouldn’t necessarily sneak anything in, you’d bribe the projectionist (cash, ass, or grass) to set up in the booth and line-in the audio feed with a splitter. Then you’d sell it to the guy at the flea market who would make copies and sell for the low.

I remember we used to rent from the video store and record to Betamax like the old tape to tape days.

Fun story: I was in my teens and my aunts came to visit from abroad. They had gone to the local video store and asked the clerk to give them something for their nephews. The clerk asked a few questions about my brothers and me, and told my aunts to come back the next day.

They came to visit and proudly handed us the video tape. We put it into the machine and it played and incredibly horribly terrible sci-fi. It was so B-movie quality, the laser rays zapped off in a totally different direction than the guns were pointing.

Aunts leave a few days later, disappointed that the movie was so bad. A week later, my mother says, the tape was bidirectional (Video 2000, the German standard of the time), we should see if there was something on the other side. We put it back in and, lo and behold, there was a movie.

It started odd. A mansion, a lady entering an expensive car. She hands her little Maltese on a leash to the butler and drives off. As soon as she’s gone, the butler kicks the dog into the giant fountain in front of the mansion and goes inside. There, he and the maids get naked and into bed.

At this point, even 15-year-old me knows what’s going on, and the entire family starts staring at my mother, who started the whole thing. She was intently looking at the screen, saying things like, “Oh, it must be so relaxing when your boss is gone and you can just rest in bed!” or “Well, staff in this mansion, they are really friendly with each other!”

Then there was silence. Then she said, “Turn off this filth!”

And we never spoke of that Sunday afternoon again.

I could swear I’ve seen this exact thread before. 🤔

My girlfriend’s dad had hundreds of movies on VHS, pirated from cassettes he’d rented in the past and copied at home by chaining two VCRs together over coaxial cable.

Software was wild pre-internet. My buddy had Windows 95 on 42 3¼" floppies that we copied onto additional sets of 42 floppies that we kept in heavy boxes and then painstakingly installed onto computers belonging to friends and family around the neighbourhood.

I also had a whole bunch of audio cassettes that contained music I dubbed from radio, other cassettes, and later CDs (burning your own was at first, impossible, and later, expensive).

I’m 46.

One thing in “my” time was bootleg concert tapes ; I guess that hasn’t changed, concerts are unique and fanatics would just buy it.

Quality was horrible.

This was a thing until well into the 2000s. VHS stayed around for a long time. We only got our first DVD player in 2003 (it was dirt-cheap - a tiny silver thing the size of a PSOne that cost maybe €35, a small fraction of the price we paid for our VCR in the '90s) and you could still get many of the latest movies on VHS at that point, both legally and illegally. There were regional differences though. From what I’ve heard, my country of Germany held onto this medium for longer than others.

Most piracy (in my experience at least) involved recording TV broadcasts and then duplicating it for friends and family or duplicating content that was otherwise available within your circle. Some people recorded DVDs onto VHS (there were even devices that had both disc and tape drive that did this very conveniently), but this wasn’t that common.

Slightly off-topic, but I had a neighbor who was very proud of being able to circumvent the copy protection and compress movies on DVD to fit onto a single CD (which would still play on a DVD player) at an acceptable level of quality that was somewhere between VHS and DVD (but closer to the latter with the right codec settings). I taught myself how to do this later on as well, although only in order to share movies and shows with others, since I quickly preferred having media on hard drives and USB drives instead of juggling discs around. My personal go-to method was to rent DVDs from the local library for free and then create backups of those I wanted to enjoy more than once. I did the same with PC games and software from that place…

I had some friends who would go on holiday and come back with VHS tapes with badly photocopied covers. The films were really bad quality as well. I was too young to understand what piracy was so I just thought that really bad videos were normal in the country to which they were going.

My dad travelled a lot in Asia during the 90s, we had plenty of VHS tapes where the box art only covered half of the case.