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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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