This was during an era where VHS was standard and DVD’s were just brand new at the time (before streaming sites existed). Chains like Blockbuster were booming back then with people renting movies or even TV shows for a fee but have to return them by an expected date, what happens is that in order to “keep” a copy, people would use a PC with disc burning software to burn the contents from that DVD onto a blank one.
Know those blank white DVDs? Basically those were used on storing a “pirated” disc for themselves before returning the rented copy back at the video rental store. When I was a kid, I remember encountering what clearly a pirated copy of The Prince of Egypt (so who ever pirated it kept the rented copy) since the disc art is crappy & low quality (it’s been printed then glued onto a blank DVD used for copying upon peeling it off).
For VHS, it was much more common to record things from broadcast. Even if someone had multiple machines, copies using standard consumer VHS degraded noticeably even in one generation.
For DVDs, writing drives were expensive and uncommon for a long time, and most early players didn’t like burned discs, so you were limited in how you could watch them anyway. I know that some people got into the mindset of physically cloning the discs, but I feel like it was at least as common to rip, re-encode just the main title with a more modern codec to shrink the size, and store that smaller copy electronically.