Panasonic NV-HS1000 VCR - tape ejects, has test signal?
 

I am in receipt of my NV-HS1000 (no remote) Unused Store Display Unit - Supposedly. got a 300w 110v to 220v converter and plugged it in (after inspecting internals).

Every thing inside is brand new, can tell as I am a HW techie myself, and moreover the head seems brand new with cleaning rollers brand spanking new, the mechanism where things move still have thin film of factory grease. I started my inpection by looking at the screws all around taking pictures in macro mode looking for previous signs of a philips screwdriver. well none of that so seems legit. fires up fine, looks in order but ejects tape.

The unit comes without remote. the Tape does get on the head and then retracts in about 2-3 seconds. (Tried multiple tapes)

The unit does output test signal (two white vertical bars).

does not rewind/ff as tape get ejected (the ff/rew button when pressed does give the graphic on display on VCR). I researched some in last hours, cleaning was an advice but there is nothing to clean in this one.

Dont want to send back as I feel this may be a minor issue and given the internal condition of the VCR.

Display shows A2 on the left and 0:00 on the right with some other very fine symbols.

Any Suggestions from Electro/Mechanical guru's here.? Is it something as simple as initial setup as I have not done any in terms of setting time etc.

Thanks

update... cleaned the two sensors(barely touched those with fingers :-), and i have it working for an hour now. not that there was anything to clean... the picture is strikingly sharp with no noise and no color bleed, i am amazed and wowed, these old vcr's are great... lets see if it holds up..

Yep, you beat us to a reply post. Sometimes that happens when you just keep after it yourself -- you're able to answer your own questions. Congrats on that, and a tip of the hat in respect for having determination and ingenuity to figure it out.

But I do want to mention this...

Always remember this site has user manuals and service manuals!
Download the manual for your exact model (or even a close version) from http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...s-service.html

The service manual for the NV-HS1000 is here: http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vide...implified.html
With those kinds of manuals, you can troubleshoot (and fix!!) almost anything.
Some you can do at home, on your own. Others require more tools and skills, and are best handled by a certified repair shop.

So while we didn't give immediate help, this valuable tip helps you long-term. :)

Thanks LS, and thank you for this website/forum/knowledgebase.

I have an issue bothering me now even though my first PAL captures from NV-HS1000 are excellent (TBC on, Sharpen slider midway, everything else Auto) and better than AIWA MX100u..

The Frame drops are very high almost 10-15%. I tried capture with or without crop (8pix all around). Tried capture (SVideo/Composite) with ATI 650 combo as well as a newly acquired ATI TV Wonder 600 PCI.

used both latest VirtualDub and your VDub software compilation with filters(without using any). Have tried rewind and forward a couple of times to loosen tape.
I was capturing initially on AMD X2 3800 with 10k Raptors, 4 GB ram, GTX 9800. Switched to following yesterday.

6 core AMD (1055T) with 8 gigs ram, boot drive SSD, capture drive 7200, 2TB. display is onboard AMD Radeon HD 4290. HDD's are AHCI mode on SATA III. I even turned off Lan Card and Virus Scanner, went to lower display resolution from 1980x1080p to 1024x720.

Capture Params - Preview/Progressive (Both Fields), size 720X576 with 8px crops, Noise Filter enabled. Audio - no compression.

Win7 64bit Enterprise. The only thing this PC is setup for now is capture. I have already read your Dropped Frame guide as well as others I could find online.

initially surprised that 3 hours VHS takes about 300gigs of space. (good thing I have a decent capture now, that I can live with in case Tape quits on me).

But resolving excessive frame drops is what I am obsessed with at present.

Thanks.

You're capturing uncompressed YUY2 then, to get 100GB/hour of video.

Instead of fully uncompressed 4:2:2 8-bit, try to use the Huffyuv codec. Resource use is lower, and may prevent dropped frames. A side benefit is that this lossless compression also gives you files somewhere between 35-40GB/hour, about 2.2 times smaller than uncompressed (which should actually be closer to 75GB/hour, not 100GB). VirtualDub is the suggested software for AVI capturing with this specific ATI capture card.

You can download Huffyuv from this site -- do a quick search (search button near top of page).

lol until now noob me, thought I was doing huffyuv (to me selection of capture filter on vdub with 720x576 yuy2 was it) and was wondering how you gurus were doing that kind of throughput back in the days and even now in most instances where software/hw forces use of old hardware.

You rock, fyi using the uncompressed method, i had 10-15% drops even on a SSD which can do 275mb per second sequential write in my latest test, so it could still be something else and not IO.

On second thought I am saturating USB bus (650 USB combo and also PCI bus newly aquired ATI 600) SSD or not.

Will report results back with huffyuv.

Thanks

-- merged --

Nope, Frame Drops are consistently 10-15% but learning of the day is how to install Huffyuv and use it.. Next tests involve turning TBC off on NV-HS1000 after ff-rev the tape multiple times. 2nd plan is to test capture using AIWA MX100u to ATI 650, ATI 600, Leadtek TV Xpert 2000, got my hands full with frame drops. Leaning towards digitalFaq's professional conversion services.

Real time profiler graph on VDub19, I see yellow/blue lines are all over the place. Some Jitter/Time error, plays to Panasonic Plasma via Aiwa fine. Cant play using NV_HS1000 as tv doesn't support pal even doesnt work with Kramer FD2C, PAL to NTSC converter.

-- merged --

good news, no frame drops, the option which was checked and forced audio clock in timing submenu causes a lot of grief for me (10-15% frame drops). Question is how will it affect ultimate capture. yet to say if audio would be in sync or not. also while capturing PAL is there a way to tell from source, if its a particular kind for eg PAL_B vs PAL_G vs PAL_I.. my vhs works with a ton of PAL/Secam types, and I have no way of knowing what was original videgraphers equipment.

Thanks

Watch the capturing meters in VirtualDub. How far off, in milliseconds (ms) does the audio ever get?

1000ms is one second, so even something as "bad" as 4ms is honestly negligible. Captures here are generally within 1ms, but sometimes tapes seem to cause a skew of up to 4ms. The worst recent audio I can remember was a few seconds at 8ms skew. Also remember that the VHS tapes themselves were not necessarily darlings of audio perfection, and audio skew exists on pretty much anything. The goal is for it to be unnoticeable, not perfectly timed to a clock that won't matter anyway. In the end, a few ms over a period of hours is at most a couple of frames. (With a calculator and sheet of paper for notes, you could probably figure the math down exactly, for worst-case scenarios -- if it really matters.)

I'm having the same problem like the TS with an NV-HS1000

There are no errors on the display, but the tape gets ejected, about 3 seconds after inserting it.

So I looked up the service manual and entered service mode by pressing "Eject + FF + Rew" and went to Mode 1 which tests the sensor led.

Tape is ejected: 1 0 3
*push tape in*
Tape inserting: 1 0 2
Tape inserted: 1 0 0

Then after 3 seconds...

Tape auto ejects: 1 0 2
Tape ejected: 1 0 3

Does this mean the sensors are working properly?

*edit* Found some videos on YouTube with someone having the exact same problem:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3m9_OG6Dmc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKD-MKrHNcQ

-- merged --

To anyone who is having the same problems, I found a solution!!! (See attachment)

I noticed that the pinch roller (arrow on the left) wasn't going down when the tape got inserted, so I manually helped pushing it down (arrow on the right) and voila! the tape didn't get ejected anymore. Then I put some WD-40 on the the metal rod and it's inserting/ejecting/playing fine right now. You probably should put some grease on the metal rod as well...

The original grease probably dried up and blocked the pinch roller from going down.

that is a very common issue - i always remove the pinch roller assembly and grease the shaft on any K-Mech deck i get before even plugging them in.
sometime they are so stuck it breaks the little plastic dink of the arm that engages the cam, then you have to buy a new roller assembly

Hello, I got a similar problem. Just received a NV-HS1000 that looks perfect inside (much better than my worn out one, which is still my best VCR), but it ejects immediately. The pinch roller does not go down after I insert the tape. However, I think I've tried everything, it doesn't move and I seem to be unable to remove it in order to grease it.
Not sure it's the pinch roller though... wouldn't it be the same symptoms if there was a more serious problem, like the main motor not starting... (Went into service mode, and the tape detection sensors work alright, and I cannot detect from that service mode any obvious error code... sorry I am more a software guy than a hardware guy).

Thanks for a wonderful forum, and sorry if this post is a little out-of-line (following up on a 1-year old thread)

Mad movie buff

once the lube dries it can take alot of force to remove
remove the white clip and then rock the roller arm back and forth while pulling up on it

Thanks a million times, mate ! I had not realized that the plastic cap was a different part than the pinch roller support. Once I managed to remove the first one (unclipping it and with some force), rocking the arm back and forth did the trick. Then put some grease on the shaft and... the VCR is working !

awesome - glad your deck is working again :)

The knack of getting the white clip off easily is to apply upward force to the white clip and at the same time pry apart the two tangs that hold the clip in place. Use a jewellers screwdriver and do it gently - the clips snap fairly readily.

Well done though - these are great machines.