Well, my JVC HR-S9600U purchase off of ebay many years ago appears to be toast and I never had the time to archive my home video tapes. It never did present a clear picture of any tape I put in and always had a tendency to eat a tape. Now the tape ejection mechanism is jammed with tape in and drum does not spin at all. Looking for a replacement with retirement coming and some time to accomplish what I set out to do but few and far between as everyone has mentioned.

Suggestions welcome. $979 for a 'refurbished' unit out of an Arizona company. Phew.....

The two major causes of the VCR eating tapes besides the tape itself being faulty are brakes and pinch roller, The fix for the former is to not fast forward or rewind the tapes inside the VCR to avoid tape spills, ultimately replace brake pads, the latter is to replace the pinch roller. Or you can sell it for parts, this hobby needs parts.

Bump. Almost out of decks again. That was fast. :eek:

What do you have left? My HR-S9600U is toast.
Thanks,
AJG

PM sent I hope you still have one left.

VCR Refurbishing
 

Sorry if this is an annoying novice question, but..

What steps do you take to recondition the VCRs that you sell refurbished? I am wondering if I should continue to search for a new or open-box JVC VCR or purchase a refurbished unit.

Thank you for taking time to address my question.

Tony

Open-box doesn't mean anything whatsoever, as the units were sold new 15-25 years ago. Nothing is "open box" or NOS (new old stock) anymore. Anybody making that claim is just lying now. At best, you'll have a used deck in well-cared-for condition in the original box, but even that doesn't mean much. VCRs age, used or not.

Refurb'ing a deck is complex, and differs per unit.

All JVC decks need alignment tweaks. The guide alignment is pressure based, and gravity takes a toll on springs. I rarely come across JVC decks that don't need a tweak. And that's not something that is easy to do, without a large test bed of tapes, or scopes (understand that even scopes can be wrong, to find the best overall alignment for the deck). Head wear affects alignment (affect, not effect), which is why I grade decks. This is probably the most time-consuming part of my refurb work.

Sometimes part swapping is needed, everything from panel control buttons to the rubber bands that drive gears. Since nothing is sold new, I rely on my "attic graveyard" of for-parts VCRs.

The worst problem I'm seeing in recent years is idiots that "clean" VCR heads for no reason (the fix-all mentality), and using the wrong tools to do it (cotton swabs aka Q-Tips, solvents, etc). There too many dipshits making Youtube videos showing you how to ruin VCRs (example). Refurb sometimes involves ACTUAL (re)cleaning of the heads, but using a magnifying glass to remove cotton debris snagged into the head cylinder, the verifying the miscleaning damage wasn't permanent. It's so tedious. I've not yet tried to rebuild a head assembly (by frankensteining multiple bad cylinders), but I know that day is coming, and I'm not sure if I want to mess with it.

Refurb'ing a JVC deck is not a fast process. A library of test videos is needed, something most people cannot get. And parts are needed, something most people do not have. Plus knowledge, and some of it not found in service manuals. Plus experience, sometimes due to costly past mistakes.

Will be PM'ing back this week. :congrats:

Essentially this. ES10/15 + non-TBC VCR is a crutch, a shortcut, with limitations. The ES10/15 is a not a TBC, and was never meant to be a TBC replacement.

I was the one that discovered the ES10 passthrough feature 16 years ago, and posted about it at VH. Both then and now, I've always stated it for anti-tearing. Others were quick to falsely proclaim it a TBC, not understand that TBC is a wide term that can mean almost anything (therefore risking it becoming a meaningless term). For years, I refer to is a "sync filter", because it was pre-processing to the frame sync. But on closer examination in the last decade, it's a crippled line TBC with a non-TBC frame sync. Crippled because it must allow passage of anti-copy, and natural errors can present as the artificial anti-copy errors.

Others have since tried all sorts of random DVD recorders, hoping for a "cheap TBC". But it's all in vain, waste of time and funds, negative economics in the hopes to avoid buying an actual TBC. ES15 was 99% like the ES10, but nothing else is. Some PAL units were essentially with-HDD ES10/15, and maybe a certain PAL Sony. It's not a big list, can count those on your fingers.

Yep,

You still have any available? Check your PMs :)

Hi @lordsmurf, do you still have any VCR + external TBC decks available? I've sent you a PM by the way. Thanks!

Lords I sent you a private message! I hope you can help me

I am looking to purchase the SR-V10, A- if it is still available! PM sent

Hi LS

As you've read in my other thread in the capture forum, I'm trying to find a good, but not top of the line S-VHS. From reading your S-VHS buying guide thread I guess I'm looking for a JVC HR 75xx+ or 9000 series NTSC model. You have some in bold, so I'm assuming those are the better ones, but I'm not sure how much of a difference there is.

I'm also in need of a decent NTSC Hi8 player/recorder that plays tapes. One that can play 8mm to Hi8 with an S-Video out port. Actually, I'm not sure why I'm even mentioning the S-Video port. I doubt you sell anything without one. :)

There doesn't seem to be anything in my area that I can get locally that would be from someone who I would be willing to say, "Hey, they know this stuff inside and out, so I'm sure it works well." You have threads from 2001 that have been updated up until now, so I'd say that you've earned your stripes.

I'm not sure how much either of those would run me, or even if you have anything in those categories right now, but I figured I'd ask.

Thanks

DM

(Above messages were all PM'd back at the time of those posts.)

I wanted to give this thread a quick bump, quick update...

It's now 2022, last thread post was 2021. :eek:

In 2022, we lost family members. I'm really glad that I cut back on my deck refurb work in early 2021, in order to spend more time with family, and then quit almost entirely by end of 2021 to devote even more time to them. It will never be enough time, but I value what we got.

That said, I've never 100% quit. Sometimes I get contacted about minty gear that our community would love to have. Not the bottom feeder schlock that is now eBay. For the good of everybody here, be they member, new reader, or non-member lurker, I can't pass that up. I'm always trying to put gear back into circulation, refurb'd to hopefully last another decade.

At the moment, I have several decks to work on. The intention is workflows, but I can often be convinced to let just the deck go.

I'm trying to find an NTSC S-VHS VCR, preferably with a TBC. My budget is up to about $600, so that probably limits me to the more consumer/prosumer models. I suppose this means HR-S7500U and upwards for TBC decks based on the buying guide here.

I'll be using it to digitize approximately 50+ family tapes, most of which are VHS-C (doubt that matters). I finally got tapes from other family members and my DVD combo unit will simply not cut it for the sheer number of tapes I'll be doing. I had issues with dropped frames (probably not the VCRs fault since I was able to alleviate the issue by changing other factors) and relatively infrequent sync issues on some tapes (definitely the VCR/lack of a TBC), and don't want to repeat the hell of videomancy.

If I buy one from you lordsmurf, when I'm done, I might do some tapes for friends but I'm likely going to sell it back to someone here to keep it in the community. I dunno if that's been done before but I don't know where else to sell it other than ebay and knowing that ebay has a poor reputation for this kind of thing and I'd like to have such a competently refurbished machine back to those who really need it.

I'm sorry for your losses lordsmurf.

Thank you.

PM me. :congrats:

It matters. :warning:

Tyi[cal homemade DVD quality, from analog tapes, simply is not that good in our modern HDTV era. You can do better, and without much difference in effort or learning. DVD recorders were always a PITA, but don't go with the devil you know.

Yep. Video capture errors, due to cheap gear, is truly a 7th circle of video hell. It makes everything irritating, and is why many people quit before their projects are done. But it can usually be fully corrected simply by not using low-end junk.

Buy it, use it, resell it. And this is a perfect place to do it. Many people have bought and sold gear here, not just me.

Thanks. :praying:

>It matters. :warning:

It does? Isn't it just a form factor difference that's negated by the adapter?

>Tyi[cal homemade DVD quality, from analog tapes, simply is not that good in our modern HDTV era. You can do better, and without much difference in effort or learning. DVD recorders were always a PITA, but don't go with the devil you know.

For the record, the DVD combo unit I've been using isn't even a DVD recorder. It's one of... those. Long story short, the quality isn't that bad in my opinion. Very few dropped frames at all (1-2 as the tape starts and stops, almost none at all during actual playback).

However, I did some tests with an S-VHS-C camcorder and the picture looked significantly better. And yet, dropped frames are a huge issue with it for some reason, and it caused VirtualDub to lose sync with the audio. The camcorder claims to have a TBC I'm guessing that's probably an overstatement, and there's a workaround I developed for regular size VHS tapes with this issue involving lossless OBS capture since that program doesn't lose audio sync when dropping frames, but I'd rather just get it right this time with the new tapes.

I have zero authority in these matters, so I'm just going to parrot Lordsmurf here by saying that you should shut down unneeded software that is more or less bloat for when you're recording. Things like Steam, any cloud storage, etc.

Most importantly, you can't do anything on the computer while it's recording. Nothing! lol

I know that sounds odd for a modern PC, but it's true. I have a high end PC that I only bought this spring and I drop frames like a madman about 50% of the time if I try to even surf the web. Crazy? Yes. Welcome to the world of analog to digital tape transfers. :)

DM

It's perfectly reasonable.

Much of the software used for capture comes from the good/old days of 32-bit applications, and data ingest doesn't provide many avenues for parallelisation or use of multiple threads.

It's not especially 'intensive' in some regards, it's quite a simple operation for a computer (as LS routinely points out, and is entirely correct, this bit is a legacy task) - it's been done since the 1980s in a very similar way.

To draw an analogy, it's just a hose-pipe of data, the computer has one task, take each block of data and put it in a file on a drive as it comes in. Without getting in to deep 'metal', it's a pretty simple operation for a middle-aged machine, let alone a blazing fast modern machine. It can be carried out in a few clock cycles. The storage speed (and the quality and consistency of that storage) is, as I understand it, the greatest potential bottleneck.

The data coming in, whilst it might not seem it, is actually pretty slow compared to some modern methods, remember this hardware is from the days of dial-up and e-greeting cards.

The trouble is, this task is busy-work going on in the background, it's very easy to trip a machine up, and whilst I'm usually dead-set against anthropomorphism of machines, I'll break my rule for this analogy as we're only painting a broad explanation.

Other applications have a nasty habit of doing the equivalent of clicking their fingers and yelling 'oi' at random intervals meaning it's quite easy for processes to be 'ignored' for fractions of seconds, when a great hosepipe of continuous data is squirting, a few cycles of ignoring the pipe means a useless piece of data, a gap, or something otherwise corrupted. Also, that data flow doesn't stop, there's no protocol for the computer to ask for the block of data again, it's just blasted along the bus, and the capture hardware is effectively designed to not care if the data was taken care of or not by the computer.

It's a bit like TCP vs. UDP in the networing realm.

TCP connections:
"Hi, I'd like to send you this thing, are you ready?"
"Yes, I'm ready."
"Here's the data"
"Okay, I don't think I got that, send again?"
"Sure, here you go"
"Ah, I got it this time, thanks"
"No, the pleasure is all mine. Ready to go again?"

UDP
"I'm just frantically yelling the data down this pipe, I quite simply don't care if you're taking notice or not, it's your problem if you can't keep up...."

It's a bit like that. If you give the computer any opportunity to not pay attention to that data, the message will have bits missing, jumbled, or otherwise useless. Or if it can't write the message to the disc quickly enough, there's only so much buffer available to old software to start a "write that in a few milliseconds" before that's exceeded. Time to just drop that data and try and carry on taking the message as best we can.

Efficient software AND modern hardware can negate this, trouble is, we're stuck doing a legacy task with some very elderly software.

There's a host of things that can be done to mitigate this, but ultimately, regardless of hardware, just let the machine do its thing whilst it's capturing.

I've taken some absolute elephantine liberties with the explanation here, and I think I've muddled myself with analogies but might help it make a bit more sense.

That does make sense.

Just out of curiosity, what happens if you turn off multithreading and set 1 core to VDub or whatever software is being used, and have the rest free for the rest of the computer? Also, setting priority for the capture software to high.

Thanks

DM

Note: This is a marketplace thread, not a discussion thread. :warning:

VHS-C tapes are harder to spool in the deck, due to the extra twists and turns. They're also generally thinner, more fragile. This makes them perfect candidates to be "eaten" by decks, so it's important to select a deck known for quality playback of the -C tapes. Certain decks are more well known for it (AG-1980), others not (including some JVCs, not all).

It only contains line TBC, not frame TBC. You need both. Line cleans the image (intra), frame cleans the signal (inter). You can attempt to cheat, use TBC(ish) devices, but it may still reject. You're seeing a rejection.

OBS isn't capture software, but screen/stream recording software. It grabs data after card output, from the display layers. It treats everything as streaming, and/or a webcam. This has problems, and can include lack of reporting dropped frames, adding digital tearing, etc. Quite a few issues. It's not made for analog videotape ingest.

Correct.

Correct.

1.9.x may crash, as it was updated long after single core. It expects multi core, and is default to that in settings. Changing it will make it as messy as the oldest versions. There are always multi tasks, and at least 2 cores being used for this. Older VirtualDub crammed it all into a core, high load, and issues.

It doesn't work that way. For example, OS swap files don't pay attention to cores, and that easily screws up capture. It's not about CPU, and CPU usage isn't that high. Think more holistic.

... but again this is a marketplace listing, not discussion thread. :warning:

Such discussions need to be taken to threads.