Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

The Video-CD had many advantages, you can record on regular CD-R and play on any dvd player. Also, the quality was crap!

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

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

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

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.

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

Megalopolis

It was fairly good quality, but Morbius.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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!

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

This is how videos like the church of the subgenuis circulated, replaced pirated VHS copies swapped for some surreal culture jamming dadism stuff.

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.

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.