Like that infamous “ET” torrent in 1982 where it involved a “pirate” sneaking a huge JVC camcorder (with a VHS reel) recording the entire movie in theaters, given this was before DVD’s existed (don’t even ask about pirate bay, those weren’t available yet). The same applies to “torrented” music, one would have a spare tape cassette recording the song played via the radio, that’s how they torrented content back then if they can’t afford an official copy.
Only millennials or Gen X who were kids back then would’ve encountered or witnessed VHS or Cassette “torrents” from either friends or family and often or not, piracy in the pre internet days was rife even before torrent sites were a thing. There are VHS “torrents” of TV shows or series (placing a camcorder which faces the TV screen with a spare reel recording the entire show (ads included), then used to fast forward upon replay.
I sort of remember that back in the 80’s we had 2 VCR’s, not sure if one was special but I don’t think so and we recorded a ton of porn for distribution for friends. Was pretty easy but the copies looked pretty nuclear and fuzzy.
camcorder at the tv gives such ugly picture. that’s for n00bs.
i was the one in my family who figured out how to connect vcrs together to copy… “family home videos”. i was 10 btw. adults were useless. 1980s Will Smith was right when the said they just don’t understand… (now though, he just don’t understand)
if i didn’t have to go to school, i could have put blockbuster out of business.
im a 90s zoomer cusper and we used vhs well into the mid 2000s. its not just millenials or gen x.
probably half our vhs tapes were recordings of tv broadcasts or other tapes. the one i remember most was a recording of rankin-bass rudolph, commercial breaks and all. (and it technically isnt piracy, as the US supreme court determined in 1984 that private home recordings counted as fair use.)
I used to pirate on vhs myself, i figured out how to do it as a kid. I was probably 10 when i started. You didn’t point a cam corder at the telly, you just piggybacked two VCRs, and recorded what you hired from the store, or taped from the telly show streaming from the antenna. Either paused at the adds or left it going. They actually appreciate people who used to record the telly shows, now, because back in the day they didn’t save anything, they recorded over all those old shows on their big film reels, so some of those old pirated tapes are the only record left. Victimless crime, either way, though.
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.
“Pirating” VHS used to be a family affair. We’d rent a movie on a friday night and record it onto a second VHS/VCR while watching it for the first time.
My Aunt brought us back a bootleg copy of Return of the Jedi from Saudi Arabia in 1983. I remember helping my Dad hook up two VCRs and continuously running copies off for a whole weekend so he could distribute them at his work on Monday in rural NSW Australia.
“Encountered”? I was raised on that shit. I was bewildered the first time I encoundered a printed graphic sleeve, and learned that some people spent shelf space on tapes with only one movie each on them…
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a lot of people made copies of LPs and tapes, or recorded off the radio… and those often got passed around at school. someone having two VCRs to make copies of movies wasn’t nearly as common. we lived in small towns or out in the boonies, so there weren’t any ‘retailers’ selling bootlegs or copies either.
i do remember downloading a few of those old cam releases back in the stone age of the internets (slow dialup). super low res and quality, often unstable video and/or audience noises. but hey, it was ‘good enuf’.
Wanna feel old?
We weren’t even born in the 80s! Or the 90s!
– Frost
Wowza. “Torrent” being synonymous with “warez” was not on my 2026 bingo card.
Ddit: maybe just “copy” was the word it was replacing? Unexpected either way IMO.
It’s an interesting equivocation. It was just considered copying. I think nobody but studio execs and jealous exes thought about it.
I dunno, I think this is just an OP thing?
To me, something has to be shared over a computer network using the bittorrent protocol to be ‘torrented’.
You’d never say sharing something with Napster or limewire was ‘torrenting’.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen someone (mis)using the word “torrent” when asking about piracy in the 90s.
i completely agree. its just the wrong term. when op said “et torrent recorded in the theater” i assumed someone digitized an old pirate vhs and put it up on torrent.
but this may just be like the term “vhs player” where the kids these days have no reason to care that it was called a vcr.
also i could be wrong, but i always understood warez the be more a software thing, and not just any media.
Strictly speaking,a VCR is a video cassette recorder. If it doesn’t have recording capability, it’s just a player.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that couldn’t record, though.
I asked this question at an electronics store. I was told “technically that’s a VCP, Video Cassette Player”. I asked if they had any. They said no.
My understanding is that they could all record. It seems like the technology to play is just the inverse of the technology to record. Like how a speaker can be used as a microphone.
They could have totally made a VCR without inputs, though. There are audio tape players like that.
Naw dude, we walked down the street and I copied a few minutes of the movie from each of my friends over the course of a couple months. It took about an hour to find the exact part to start at to make sure there were no hiccups in the recording, but by then we only had a couple minutes to copy what was next before dinner was ready.
Then the next day we’d set it all up at another friend’s house and do it again.
Upvote for the silly joke. 😄
Thank you I was actually so confused lmao I’m like, are they distributing this ET reel in pieces?
My parents “pirated” all the time when I was a kid. We’d generally have no more than basic cable (usually just antenna). There would be free weekends for HBO, Cinemax, or Showtime back when there was only one of each. My parents always had blank 8hr VHS cassettes and they’d record three movies to each. They recorded on SLP or EP mode (depending on the VCR model) to get that much time per cassette and it would end up with the crappiest quality ever. If you think VHS is shit quality, watch a movie on EP mode. Our movie collection was pretty extensive, but 90% of it was this.
You’d have to remember to reset the counter when putting in the tape and fast forward to a specific counter time written on the cassette in order to see the movie you want. My favorites were always second or third.
I vaguely remember talk of Dad climbing the pole to connect the cable himself but that went away when cable boxes became a requirement. There was also a time when he ran a coax from the neighbor’s apartment and we split the bill. That didn’t last long though because that neighbor moved.
My parents were sailing the seven seas back when your only option was a row boat.
My (58yo) VHS cinéphile collection was freaking extensive. Back then, as today, we didn’t watch TV but I bought, and scrutinised to no end, the program & set the VCR to record. I always had blanks, 3h for long movies and 4h for 2 “normal” ones. When we moved countries, at a time when DVDs where a thing, a friend of mine asked to keep the tapes because it was so good. Every Hitchcock, every Bogart, every Kubrick, every… You name it. Series even.
Yeah quality was shit, but “tomb of the fireflies” and “princess bride” totally made to the deepest of my heart, until today and forever. At work I had “Singing in the rain” as a testing tape - each time I used it, you had everyone passing in front of the beamer stop, and watch.
Emotion trumps quality.
Singing in the rain is a banger that I rewatch every now and then. Everyone should watch it, even if you’re not “into” musicals - there’s SO much more going on! A fun satire of hollywood using every trick in the book to get there. chef’s kiss
My Dad got us a fancy VCR that could fast forward to chapter markers we could manually add to each vhs. Of course, fast forward wasn’t instant, and sometimes the marker on the tape would get corrupted over time…
My parents had a A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back VHS tapes that they recorded from TV showings… but not ROTJ. I spent like 2 or 3 years worrying about Han because we didn’t have ROTJ lol.
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.
Recording music from the radio (or video from tv) at home was not and is not piracy/illegal. In fact it is part of your rights when you buy a blank cassette.
To this day almost all countries recognize this right to home recording. As long as you aren’t acting to circumvent a copy protectionion system you are good to go.
