VCR-DVD player loses color, jumpy picture?

[Nickhamm]

I have a Magnavox MDW2205 VCR/DVD Player that plays VHS tapes fine, but the DVD side slowly looses color the longer it's on until it stops outputting color completely.

I have a Toshiba D-VR5SU DVD Recorder/VCR that plays DVDs fine, but the VCR side plays tapes with a jumpy picture and lots of noise, though sound is absolutely fine. When I first received it, the VCR portion functioned fine. Since it has been in my possession, the remote has not worked. I tested the remote on a similar model a friend had and the remote itself is fine, the VCR I have just won't receive any infrared input (I tried a third party generic remote as well with no success.)

I would love to get one (or both!) working instead of having to string together both machines to make a complete working unit.

Video link to show the problems: https://youtu.be/2bfiICmRCj4

[aramkolt]

My guess on the Magnavox is bad surface mount capacitors on the digital board that tend to go bad. There's whole youtube channels where they refurb lots of those and there's almost always some caps bad there. Problem with their method is that they test them in circuit which can give a falsely "ok" reading, but it'll often catch very bad ones. I just redid a toshiba unit where they didn't read too bad in-circuit, but several were completely open when testing out of circuit. Downside is that to get those out of circuit, they legs are basically broken off, so you can't put the capacitor back that you tested unless you remove it with something like a hot tweezers which probably isn't great for the remaining cap life either as a lot of these vintage machines also used lead free solder which means much higher melting temperatures for the capacitor to be exposed to.

As for the Toshiba unit, odds are that the heads are dirty. You might find that the picture looks better in FF/Rew too, but for that, I'd just use the paper and alcohol method, swabs or cleaning sticks can damage heads. Also possible that there's cap issues on that one, but less likely given the type of mostly static looking picture you have there.

[Nickhamm]

Ok, cleaning the Toshiba Head with iso alcohol soaked paper strips fixed the noise on the VHS side for me, so that's a step in the right direction. I checked the IR sensor window and it was clean. The sensor does not seem to be damaged. Apparently something was loose somewhere though, because upon reassembly the remote mostly worked. There are a few buttons that don't, but that seems to be a fault of the remote itself. I suspect it had some sort of liquid damage, so I may try to clean it up or order a replacement first party, as third party remotes seem to not play nice.

On the Magnavox, I opened it up and visually looked at the caps, but couldn't find anything obvious. I am going to borrow a multi meter and will try to do some poking around once I get that.

[aramkolt]

Would just be aware that a multimeter won't detect bad capacitors. You really need an ESR meter. Even then, the reading you see can be falsely "more ok" than they are because of surrounding circuitry. If it is relatively few caps, you could just change them all to either non-SMTs or replace with SMTs. If you want to do a more limited recap, the ones that are lower in value tend to go bad first, but a lot of it comes down to the original manufacturer as well. Often they use multiple manufactures in the same machine, so all of the 22uf 16V could be one brand whereas the 1uf 50V caps might be a different brand, not that it is very easy to tell brands, you just might notice the printing looks a lot different on some versus others. The SMTs that usually never need changing are those with purple, pink, or green printing on top which tend to be organic polymer that don't really ever go bad because they don't have a liquid electrolyte in them.

[lordsmurf]

Both of these are relatively low-end, nothing remarkable, and probably not worth repairing.

The exception would be
- for nostalgia reasons (you had one of these as a kid, etc)
- or as learning fodder, to try VCR/electronic repair techniques