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).
The matrix came out in 1999. At that time the quality of that movie blew my mind. I remember around then you could play movies on pc with powerdvd or similar. It was a bit choppy at times but it worked.
Decss came out the same year which enabled dvd ripping. It was slow as hell back then to rip and encode a dvd. You had to use multiple tools to split the streams (audio/video) encode the audio and video separately and put them back together again. It sucked.
Divx also came out in about 1998-1999 which was a hacked up mpeg 4 codec that enabled higher quality encodes at smaller sizes.
Piracy in the 90s was more focused on audio and sneaker netting copies of stuff with your friends. The tech was just emerging to rip movies.
Dvds in the 90s were rare anyway because the players were expensive. VHS copying was much easier, as you just need two VCRs