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).
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
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.
It was fairly good quality, but Morbius.
This is how videos like the church of the subgenuis circulated, replaced pirated VHS copies swapped for some surreal culture jamming dadism stuff.
What’s up with these “Hello fellow pirates” posts with AI seeming language from piefed.social accounts made 2-3 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.
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.
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.
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.
Was it good rap?
Asking the right questions
ngl i’m actually curious and want to watch this
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
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?
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.
The full cinema experience at home, for free!
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.
Was it 160x120?
Something super tiny like that, yeah. It was nasty! :D
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.
A Serbian Film… don’t watch it. You have been warned.
Yeah, I’ve read the plot summary … that one shall remain unwatched forever.
It’s a bit of a try hard meme film tbh, you’re not missing anything.
