Sony HVR-M25U HDV DVCAM wont play HDV?
 

Hey there I have a Sony HVR-M25U 1080i HDV DVCAM DV Digital VCR that I use for mostly dvcam which it plays great but I have a stack of HDV discs and it will not play them. It will start skipping and pausing and jumping around. I cannot figure out why they wont play in this. They played great in my old machine. I have cleaned the heads and cant find much on the issue.

Probably deteriorated tapes, Have you tried recording in HDV and play back the recording?

Its not the tapes.. my friends hdv player played it fine. It is something with the machine.

Well if it plays DV/DVCAM tapes this rules out mechanical issues, So this will point out to the HDV decoding chip, It may have some failure in the PCB. Bad capacitors, dry solder joints, lifting chips, bad chips, it is not an easy task to troubleshoot this kind of failures for an average person without tools. I would still record few minutes in HDV mode and play it back and give it to your friend to see how it plays on his end.

There's also a bunch of switches on that machine - it might not automatically choose DV versus HDV as it is playing and it's possible that you might have to switch something on the front that tells it you are playing an HDV tape.

But if you're saying that it plays some HDV tapes and not others in the current configuration, that wouldn't really explain it.