Back in my day, you had to know exactly how long, in minutes, three separate movies were in length to see if they’d fit on one cassette.
Recording VHS tapes was a unknowingly wild time in human history.
Yessssss! And then having to fast forward thru them to watch the third movie. 🤣
Totally forgot about those sp, lp, and slp.
The same was true for making mixed audio tapes. You’d need to know the total length of all the songs you wanted on it if you wanted all of them in totality.
Actually that was still true for burning your own CDs and DVDs. I made DVDs of my favorite Futurama episodes from the official DVD releases and had to ensure that they’d fit (of course with a PC it was easier to reprocess the episodes to make them take up less room).
I honestly had lots of fun doing my own mixes back when, but having a media server now is way better.