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Not to dig up old threads, but I just noticed I never replied to this and feel bad for leaving it.
There are tapes that this machine just can't play and it shows the S-VHS ET flag. There are tapes where I can get them to play by driving the tracking manually as far as it will go, when they aren't playing it shows the the S-VHS ET flag. When the heads where dirty and it wouldn't play anything, it was continually showing the S-VHS ET flag.
So either that flag just comes on when it can't lock to a standard, or there is an issue with this VCR that it defaults to S-VHS ET when it gets confused. It's over 10 years old, so I can't really fault it
I will say the automatic tracking on it is abysmal, I had to manually track nearly everything. (but again, old machine, caps could be dead in the tracking circuit)