VHS to DVD Recorder / Quality got worse after some plays of the tape
 

Hi,

I try to rescue my old homevideos to DVD and will process them later. But I noticed some heavy quality decrease after I played my tape several times to adjust my capture card (which I will not use now because of it's bad deinterlacer).

But my knowledge is not good enough to tell if this is a problem from the tape or the vcr? The image got much more noise since the first play.

I cleaned the head with 99% Isopropanol and a chamois swab but this seems to make no difference.

Can someone tell me what's the problem here? Thanks in advance!

If it matters: I use a Funai WD6D-M100

Yes the second capture is noisier than the first, especially at the bottom edge of the picture. As to the cause, it may still be a dirty tape path. Not just the heads but the entire tape path should be cleaned. There are many places in the tape path where dirt from the tapes can lodge, and a little dirt in many places can add up to a bigger problem and a degraded capture.
I'm a service technician. Often it takes me perhaps 20 minutes to fully clean the tape path of a VHS vcr.

So I made the tape path "dirty" with this tape? Because I did not take it out while doing those captures. Just playing it over and over again for several minutes and rewound the tape.

From here it's very hard to know what is the cause. Perhaps the tape path was a little dirty before you played the tape the first time, then each time playing the tape added a little more dirt, enough to degrade playback. Rewinding the tape also runs the tape over the same parts. Is it a good quality tape like TDK?

Ideally the machine should be in excellent condition before playing any tape.

It is a BASF tape. So you mean I should clean the tape path everytime when I want to convert a new tape?

Maybe I should check a commercial tape if the grain/noise is better there.

Normally we don't need to clean tape path before every tape. Yes check a good tape but not an important tape to you. Only play your important tapes when you are sure they or the VCR won't be damaged.

So I feeded a "good" Samsung VCR into the AV Input of the Funai and recorded it the same way on a DVD. The picture is a bit darker but it looks cleaner than the image from the Funai. Am I right? So maybe my other tapes are already bad (because I played them?) and the Funai needs just a bit more cleaning? Or are the heads already damaged/worn out from the first tape I played a lot. I have no idea how fast you can wear out a head or how fast you can damage it (and what it would look like)

I attached two screenshots from the captures (I use video-compare for this)

Funai is a very low budget crappy VCR, It's target customer are people who are looking for a $19.99 VCR back in the day, No DNR, mediocre image processing, It also doesn't help when you take that crappy quality and convert it to MPEG-2 DVD, noise will get worse as MPEG-2 compression is not efficient for noisy sources. If you can't get a good S-VHS VCR with built in line TBC and capture lossless AVI for optimum quality that about as good as it gets.

Could it just be the tape? BASF seems to be a problem…

BW

Methinks the tape is degrading with every play.