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).
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.
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.
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.
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
eDonkey. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.
A long time.
The new Naked Gun was really bad and not funny at all. It was torture to watch.
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
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
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.
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 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.
What’s up with these “Hello fellow pirates” posts with AI seeming language from piefed.social accounts made 2-3 days ago?
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.
My first experience with lektors (thanks for teaching me the name!) was years ago with a season of
M*A*S*HI 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! 😆
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.
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
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?
Weird that I’ve never run into that. Was it a short, normal hentai length, or like a full movie? Did you happen to keep it?
Good question. I don’t remember. :/ Sorry >.<
Oh well, too bad. It probably wasn’t great, but I always get curious when vintage bootleg hentai gets mentioned.
Got any good ones? ;)
