Did I waste $10 on this S-VHS VCR?

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement to today's video we're gonna be talking about vcrs and probably an interesting video where i don't really cover much but um i picked up this vcr here at the thrift store today it's a phillips what model number vr 960 forehead hi-fi vhs vcr and it's super vhs with vhs et which means it can record super vhs on regular non-super vhs tapes i haven't really talked about this much on the channel but i think everyone knows i have a love affair with crts maybe bordering on an addiction but i also kind of well recently at least i've really been liking vhs decks now the funny thing is i got rid of all my vhs tapes except for like just a couple years and years ago and all the vcrs that went with it and recently i'm kind of wanting to rekindle the i don't know not the joys of vhs the struggles of vhs like all of that i used to record a lot of tv onto videotapes it was my way of time shifting right so i would i've maxed out the program schedule on the vcr and then i'll go back and watch those tapes later fast forwarding through commercials and stuff like that in the end i used to have this pretty high-end jvc vcr it's like a gold color had a time based corrector in it and it had commercial skip built in so it would record and i if i recall it would go back and scan through the tape quickly looking for the commercial breaks and would mark those on the tape so that as you were playing you could quickly skip over all the commercials and it would do a pretty good job of it it also marked the tape with index marks so it was a lot easier to find recorded programs so every time you started recording or it started recording it would mark an index mark i'm trying to think if it would mark the time and date with the mark i'm not sure if it did that or not i have a panasonic vcr now that does that so that's pretty helpful but you could use a remote to just skip like three programs ahead and that way you could find the stuff you recorded pretty easily anyhow these days it's kind of hard to find vhs vcrs a lot of them have just been tossed out or you know they don't work anymore and for some reason here in the portland area the vcrs don't show up that often in thrift stores i don't do a lot of thrift store shopping anymore i just i already have too much stuff in the house but i stopped off to actually drop things off to be donated today and i thought let me like quickly look inside and i just do a really quick pass through and there were two vhs vcrs sitting there this one and a really junky no-name brand like you know into the 2000s that you know they had those weird brands selling them it wasn't even like symphonic it was something i had never heard of before it was junk i just left that thing behind this vcr though like i said 10 bucks i was able to plug it in so at least it powered up you know i was able to turn it off and on and i appeared inside i could see the head was spinning briefly when it powered up but interesting is at this thrift store they had not a single vhs tape otherwise i would have grabbed one at least try to play in this vcr see if it could at least load the tape anyhow this thing is pretty decent what kind of caught my eye on it is it's one of the less wide versions the width of the machine is less than these panasonic ones i have i think they all seem to be just a little bit wider and i was actually looking to have a vcr i could put upstairs underneath the tv i have up there which is on a little cart and the wider vcrs just don't fit on the cart i think this should so taking a look at the front here we got some interesting branding here if you know phillips like i said looks like there is front inputs although no super vhs input on the front vcr plus this is something they had in the us and canada where you looked in the tv guide and next to a program you wanted to record it would have a five six digit code and on vcr's the support of vcr plus in the programming menu you just typed in that code and it would automatically schedule that specific recording for you so you have to you did not have to put in the channel time date etc etc it just it was able to do that from vcr plus uh turbo drive whatever the hell that means match line has match in like three dashes line got a menu button on the front i don't have a remote of course for this channel up down record button you know we have play stop eject fast forward looks like it might have frame advance backwards and forwards still pause and svhs et mode so that's to turn on the ability for the vcr to record the svhs like i said on regular vhs tapes it's funny because by the end of the vhs run you know into the you know by the time this vcr came out which is you know late in the cycle even regular tapes you bought were high enough quality that you could record super vhs on them with no problems and that's exactly what the et mode did super vhs et itself is just a slight tweak on the regular super vhs standard that basically i think it lowers some of the luminance levels slightly on the super vhs tapes but when you play back a super vhs et tape a vcr like this will say you know et playback but if you stick it into an older super vhs vcr that doesn't even support et it can still play it back the playback is backwards compatible with regular super vhs decks even the ones that were precursor to the et mode but honestly uh the only difference in a super vhs tape and a regular tape is a little sense hole on it i mean there might be some differences in the you know the way the tape has made itself the uh the magnetic material that's on it especially in the early days but back when i had a super vhs deck i um i think i had one before the et mode and i just used to drill out that extra little hole and i would record super vhs on regular tapes and it worked fine and then later i got that silver jvc i'm talking about it had the et mode and i'm pretty sure i used that because yes the quality when you have et is a lot better let's see what else is going on with this vcr here on the back these x's here this has to do with like the stock keeping of the thrift store so yeah video cassette recorder like i said vr 960b 120 volts this is 22 watts blah blah blah let's see here it is manufactured in malaysia pretty much everything vcr wise was made in malaysia by the end there is a date july 2000 philips consumer electronics i do have to wonder did phillips actually manufacture vhs mechanisms at least this late in the game or is this machine branded phillips but the reality is like it's a funai mechanism or a jvc or a panasonic mechanism i thought by the end you had jvc and panasonic making mechanisms and maybe you had funai and maybe some other companies so we have svhs in and out here or s video sorry s video in and out here we have a regular av input rf in and out uh what else is going on there's a little switch here it looks like it's for the channel selector for the rf output panasonic vcrs which is all the vcos i have around the house right now are panasonic i think i have a toshiba as well that setting is in the menu but on this one you do have to swap the little switch here bottom nothing much going on it's just plastic as is usual oh the side looks nasty what the hell it's like someone took a rag and wiped it with coffee or something not much on the other side and it does have a phillips logo on the top all right so let's test this out i'm going to move the camera and take the cover off and we'll look inside all right so let's get this cover off because i just want to make sure that you know nothing looks obviously broken on the inside if this thing doesn't work um i don't think i can return it so it is junk and it will go to e-waste i mean i'll try to fix it if it's something simple but if it's something not simple like like gears are broken or it's seriously damaged inside then i yeps like i said this is going to be tossed out if you're buying an old vcr like this well there's stuff falling over on the bench here i do recommend that before you actually put a tape in it you should take the top off and just look inside alrighty so there it is let me get my magnifying goggles on here so you want to check that things aren't like obviously broken in here this stuff all looks fine the pinch roller there for the cap stand that looks decent there's a lot of filth on the uh was it's the cap stand right so i'm gonna have to clean that this is the audio head i think tracking and stuff like that linear audio and the control signals come through this head the spinning head here of course is a forehead unit let's see i'll tilt this up so you can maybe get a look zoom in alright so you can see the little heads there's there's heads right there and there's a head and there's a head yep so there's groups of two one two and one two so that's the one it says four heads now this actually has six heads because to have hi-fi audio actually has an extra set of heads so i'm not super familiar if it's like the front head or the back head has two in there uh has the hi-fi audio in the regular head now vhs and i think beta in nbc nbc ntsc land like the us and canada here actually oh that's funny i don't know what that's all about it actually lays down the audio first if i recall at a different azimuth so it's like a different angle on the tape and then the video is actually recorded on top of the hifi signal and they are at different frequencies so that while the video is overwriting the audio there's enough i keep hitting that there's enough of the audio left in the tape kind of deeper in the tape that it's able to pick it up when it's being played back so the the video does not completely erase the audio that's written down first now of course for the audio and the video it's recording like in helical scan so the tape is loaded up we'll see that in a second and you know it's swiping across the tape really quickly so hi-fi audio is actually reading from one head to the other side there's circuitry in the head and you know maybe it's up here that switches between the two heads very quickly this will if i recall one revolution of this is one set of video fields so it's an interlaced video signal right say it's a 720 by 480 well one rotation is 240 lines and then the next one is the other 240 lines anyhow i'm not super expert at videotape if you want to know more about it you check out the wikipedia article because that's certainly going to have you going to give you better information than me all right so this vcr here you can see here here's the power supply this is a switch mode power supply so yeah you want to make sure that you know you don't see bulging caps things that look all screwy there's a dead bug there let me get the tweezers look at this oh it's just a piece of tape it's not actually a dead bug okay but i am just inspecting these caps here just making sure that nothing's leaking it all looks completely fine power resistors there that looks good as well for loading the tape this is the mechanism here i think this is the motor that does that and there's a belt right here so if this belt is slipping well that of course can cause issues uh what's going on here why is this spring like this that's weird it's almost like uh this is a way to adjust the tension on on this spring here um so far so good let's see here this is the back tension here that looks okay yep that's not broken everything is good i don't see any debris or a little bit of crap there this here is a head cleaning thing honestly i don't like these so what this can do right here i'm not sure you'll see it i'm going to tilt the vcr up here they see this little foam thingy here that supposedly rubs against the heads to clean them i don't like those because they start to degrade over time so i'm just going to pull this whole thing off if i can i'm not really familiar with this particular mechanism okay so i don't know how to get this off so i'm just going to take the whole wheel off there we go just to pull this off manually there it is it's just like a little foam thing i just don't like those because as they degrade it can just put a bunch of crap on the head which isn't going to help your video playback capability all right if we look over here so this is the tuner i have my hand on here uh that's pretty big thing but yeah whatever this little extra board here so there could be bad solder joints on that i've got some ribbon cables here costs a lot of caps look at this got all those caps on there's a whole ton none look leaky though so that's good another little board right here it's kind of wobbly so that could be a bad connection as well who knows you know we're just looking for potential problems i think everything else is okay yeah i mean i don't know it was a bit of weird rubbing there i wonder if the tape got caught at one point all right i think it's time to at least plug this in so let me cut away there's an extra zip tie on here oh these clippers are dead absolutely dead all right so let's get this powered up see what happens all right the head spun up that's a good sign uh we got some flashing lights on the front that say i don't know there's a clock and a tape icon flashing but when we turn it on i don't know is that focused in there it is says channel 2 slp as is oh there's a level meter i can see that's kind of nice oh of course the glare is keeping you from seeing that it's all very dim this thing probably got a lot of use as is typical with a lot of these vcrs there's no easy way to change the speed of the recording from the front maybe it's in the menu on this all the panasonic's i have you gotta use the darn remote and even like a universal remote i have some like cheap universal remotes they don't have a button for speed luckily what i do have is some logitech harmony which were like programmable universal remotes you programmed them on your computer and luckily you could still program those logitech has discontinued the whole harmony line but they've kept the programming stuff online and available so yeah i've actually recently programmed one of mine for some of my other stuff like for panasonic so i can switch the speed on those all right but anyways that's really great that turning this on caused the head to spin what i want to do is give this head a little bit of a clean here's a top tip and i learned this from 12 volt vids check out his channel if you're into repairing this kind of stuff he was a repairman like in a shop for vcrs i think they did sony and panasonic and jvc so he's really knowledgeable about that stuff now he's just a hobbyist like me but of course he has the experience of fixing many many things like dots and tape decks like audio cassettes vcrs tvs stereos i mean the the works and in a commercial setting he learned how to do it quickly and effectively so his method i really like is take a piece of paper and add some isopropyl alcohol to it like this and you're going to rub the head so the head on vcr always turns counterclockwise and that is the way you want to do it so you put your hand on there and you basically turn this you put your finger on it and you'll see i bet a bunch of crap is going to come off he says and i understand that you don't want to turn it any other way you want to be very careful about those heads because the heads there are fragile and can get damaged so let's see what it came off look at that that crud just came off the head there so i'll do it again just always go counter clockwise that's the key still a bit coming off there so i'll do one more time here the little openings on the head that i was showing you know when you looked at the head close up there that's what you want to be careful of you do not want to damage the little tiny head that's inside there wow there's still a little bit of crap coming off here let's keep going all right that's pretty good now next up uh you want to clean this right here which is the erase head and this right here which is the audio in the control head and you want to also clean these things like these metal parts here that the tape rolls over or rides on so i'm just going to use this little thing here and first we'll do the cap stand which yep as i can see it's pretty cruddy looking you could use just a regular cotton swab on this as well okay and the audio head here now the control signals is what like picks up sync and stuff like that as far as i'm aware and if this is dirty or messed up you know you might have problems with tracking issues like that i should have probably tried to load a tape in this thing first before i actually clean any of this because this thing could be broken for all i know it is very typical on these types of vcrs that they're like i said there's this loading belt right here there's one more belt on the bottom here it probably goes from like a motor here and this is what turns the spindles here for you know rewinding fast forward play stuff like that um the cap stand here and the pinch roller this is what actually controls the speed of the tape while it's playing this is the take-up roll and this of course if you're rewinding this just sort of slips but turns and that feeds the tape in but this is what's pulling the tape through at the exact right speed you know to maintain proper playback so if you have a problem with this like say this pinch roller here this black roller is say all corroded or gummy or falling apart or hard then you might not have the ability to play the tape properly even if these are turning properly so you can kind of see that a little bit of black gunk is on this little pad but not a whole lot i'm going to get a cotton swab and i'm going to use some windex on here let's try to get this a bit cleaner because that that alcohol is not doing it and i recently had a video i think on the main channel where i talked about this cleaning disk heads sometimes alcohol is not enough and you have to if it's really gummed up you got to use something a bit more soapy and i find that windex works really well and yeah this is some black gunk is coming off here oops and while i'm at it i'm going to use this with some windex and clean this pinch roller here now this is rubber and personally i don't like to use alcohol on these i mean lots of people do i don't know i've almost heard that it kind of dries out look at that gunk coming off there so yeah i've heard that dries out rubber so you don't necessarily want to use any kind of alcohol to clean rubber so i use windex instead yep you just want to make sure that's nice and rubbery and it seems okay is it that's pretty hard i don't know we'll see we'll see if that causes a problem all right let's try to clean this a little better i think we are good to go all right so here's a tape it's top gun i'm not going to actually show any of this i'll put this in if there's a problem i will pull the power cord and then manually unload all this so i have my hand on the power cord in case this all decides to jam okay so definitely this loading belt is slipping but there loaded the tape properly okay cool so it's plain this is all normal so when this belt is slipping like it is here i had to kind of help the tape into the vcr and let's try to eject it here let's see i hit stop and eject i think it's slipping so i'm going to try to clean this belt a little bit here let's see first i'm just going to use a little windex on a microfiber cloth here should unplug it while i have my hands over the switching power supply here so i'm just going through the belt here i'm trying to clean it off okay not a lot of crap came off of there but sometimes it's just you know dusty or whatever and just a little windex is all you need to get a good nice solid thing now it's trying to load the tape is roll it back here see it was actually moving the basket there so this is how you can manually unload the thing so i'm turning this see it's starting to move here but there we go so it's back okay put the power back to the vcr let's see what happens here let's see if it loads on without help okay that worked nope i was not happy let's try that again interesting okay how weird that this worked and it's now deciding not to work we actually got a successful play out of it but now it's not working i reset the power hmm let's say on the front here weird that time clearly it's working all right i'm going to hit stop and let's see it would be if we can rewind so with vhs the later vcrs you see the tape is still spooled around here completely okay so it's going backwards right now see how quickly it goes that's pretty normal say it stop it stops very abruptly now just sort of spools the tape to kind of take up any slack and let's hit fast forward so it should be going this way now but yeah earlier earlier vhs decks would actually unload the tape completely while it's fast forward and rewinding later ones like this definitely don't do that as you can see it's still completely spooled around the head here very typical all right fast forward rewind working and we hit play actually what i'm going to do is rewind this all the way to the beginning because there's like a like some previews at the beginning and i feel a little bit better at least showing those without audio than the middle of the movie all right let's eject and see if that insert and eject process works a little bit better so it unloaded the tape it's all very slow it's just maybe i'm just not used to this mechanism okay let's uh do that again okay i think what was happening with that in and out is the vcr when it's off it seemed to just take the tape in and then pop it right back out again so if i turn the vcr off it's off right now let me put this in i turn it back on so now it's on okay i think what's going on this is what i think what's going on i think notice how when i put it in it started playing right away and that's because the right protect tab is snapped out of this tape because it's commercial tape i think what's happening is that this thing must retain the programs like if you said to record tv programs most vcrs when you unplug the power would lose that program i think what's going on is that this vcr retains that and when i put in a right protected tape it says nope because it senses that it's right protecting it can't do program recordings on a right protected tape so um and the reason why i think this is happening because if i eject let's look at let unload okay give me the tape the whole thing's just slow seems very slow uh see if i can get this to show up come on i want the camera okay i think you can kind of see it's certainly easier for me to read there's the time because it's on right now when i turn it off see the flashing clock icon right there hopefully that is visible there's a flashing clock and a flashing tape icon that to me indicates that it thinks it needs to record because of the clock less in like timer recording and it will not be happy getting a tape with this tab broken out right here i'm quite sure with this particular tape mechanism that this motor not only handles the loading unloading i'm pretty sure it also is handling the tape loading and stuff like this moving the cap stand the pinch roller around and this stuff because when i put it in oh let's turn the vcr back on so it doesn't just eject okay it's on when i put this in see this is still spinning while it's loading all this stop spinning now because um it does not handle the tape transport of like the turning of the spindles it's just handling the movement of all this stuff if i hit stop and we hit eject yeah it starts spinning right away so if this belt is slipping it's going to affect the loading and unloading of the tapes i still think it's actually slipping because it just all seems a bit slower than it should be so i should replace this belt does this belt come off let me unplug the power let's see if this comes off easily oh look at that how easy is that that is awesome let me see if i have a replacement belt but actually first okay let me find my my little belt collection here a bunch of belts here i need to order some more because i found one vendor online that seems to have like a whole bunch of different size belts and things all of these look too little these don't have sizes on them but these are really small belts and uh this belt is i think bigger than these how about these yep those are too small yeah it's almost like this one let's see let me get my caliper this belt here the one i just took off is it's about one millimeter and like this and all this stuff i have it looks like it's maybe half oh no actually this one is one millimeter the one i took off it's almost like 1.25 millimeter but maybe it's 1.5 i mean it's not the most accurate caliper right i certainly try one of these thinner belts i just don't think it's gonna work oh maybe i have more hold on let me look let me look what else do i got in here okay these are flat belts so no those aren't going to work all right here's a belt it's thinner but it's certainly smaller a little bit smaller than the one that's on there so power's off let me try to put this on oh let me clean these little rollers too this is looking a little crust-o-matic okay there we go another belt is reinstalled it's definitely too small well as in you know the diameter of it let's see if i plug this in and we put a tape in then it works a little faster okay power on tape in oh yeah that is working normally see how much faster the the whole thing moved there let's stop it and eject it okay maybe that's no different it seemed like it was faster going in all right well either way on this particular mechanism if you have a phillips vcr or you see i have another piece here with the same mechanism and it is slipping it loading the tape or it's not like loading the tape or unloading the tape properly around the heads it's this belt right here you can change it without taking anything out you just unravel it and take it off and put it back on super easy okay i'm definitely gonna have to order some more belts some bigger ones and i'm gonna put the right one on here but i will leave that one on there for now i'm just about to plug this into the monitor so we can look at that but take a look at that piece of paper there from cleaning the heads all that crud came off the reed right head there so this paper method works really really well i gotta say all right what i'm gonna do is plug this vcr into my retro tink here so i'm gonna watch this on the big screen so to speak maybe i'll do a video capture as well while i'm at it so i got an svhs cable here all right svhs out and we need some speaker action going on here let's use these speakers here all right so there it is we have video put the phone on silent there uh let's see here let's go to full screen full screen preview yes there it is okay so channel two huh let's see avn rear av in front nice how about menu oh what an ugly looking menu how do you that goes in and out okay select is channel up down end is menu confirm is okay there's actually ok button on here dspc no clue what that is i'm going to have to look that up oops on-screen mode on or off blue background on or off timer recording speed manual let's see here change okay auto or manual video stabilizer i wonder what that is let's uh i don't know turn that off and on audio out hi-fi or mono so mono would be of course the linear track that was in here not the spinning head audio okay sap are stereo that's for the rf input auto dbs dbs record link must be some kind of like i don't know editing thing svhs mode on or off okay rear inputs you have to manually pick if you're going to be s video in or not got it tune our setup okay let's quickly look in there let's see cable or let's see how do we switch this change change to antenna okay whatever no big deal and what's under initial setup clock whatever dbs receiver hmm okay so this is something where it like beams the the ir controls out of the vcr to try to change your satellite receiver digital broadcast satellite i think it stands for it's i think maybe able to change the channel but no maybe not maybe it says controller beats me that's something i'll never use so i don't really care about that and it does seem to support cable box as well uh so i don't know what you could do here av rear who knows whatever that is not stuff i'll ever use right anything else under initial setup clock language english what do we got for languages espanol french okay french spanish english and then we have the vcr plus channel thing i never used it so okay so i recall what this is is when you looked in your tv guide and you saw that the tv program you want to record was on channel 2 you know in the tv guide but on your cable system channel 2 say it was abc was actually on cable on channel 7. so you had to do a mapping in here to say anytime vcr plus was set for channel 2 which is what you saw in tv guide you put in channels the vcr would tune to channel 7 for that so you still have to do this manual setup even though he was trying to be easy to use the fact that cable tv networks rarely or often remapped your channels for you which was a bit frustrating but again something that we will never ever use okay i certainly waffled on a lot here let's hit play are we gonna get a picture getting something okay it's sort of flickering on and off quite a bit that the retro tank doesn't always work super great with vhs because vhs has sort of unstable sync oh there oh no okay so retro tank is very much struggling there okay is there audio though yes there is audio okay um i'm gonna have to plug it into the uh the old pvm here because um we're getting an image but it's certainly having problems and i'm pretty sure that is all about this tank here it just does not like let's change the modes on the side here there's a couple of little switches here see if that helps at all all right well that's a bit disappointing uh par for the course let's just switch through the modes on here and see if any of the other ones work better nope they do not all right hit stop there okay and yes of course it's stuck in slp as they always are let's plug the s video into the sony pvm and we'll try that there it is sony pvm right here uh let's see okay we can see everything in the camera so if i hit play i'm sure that's going to work a lot better and it does absolutely like i said retro tank it just doesn't appreciate the very unstable sink uh that we're seeing so on the vcr here there are level meters which i kind of like i kind of like that uh let's see what else is there to do i don't know let's eject this and put on a different tape where i can play the audio because i want to make sure that the hi-fi tracking is working properly all right here is a tape this is a sony tape and you notice this little gray looking that's electrical tape actually in there that is because i drilled the hole for the s video it's underneath there and if i peel that tape off then decks like this or my other panasonic will will know or think this is an s video tape this is just like a sony this is what kind of tape it is right here it's some kind of a cheapy well it was three for five dollars six hour premium grade but pretty much works great for svhs so let's pop this in and let's rewind this nice fast rewind oh look at that okay so on the tv let's zoom in it's actually showing us like where in the tape it is now the panasonic some panasonic's do that as well beginning and end and it's going to give you indication of where in the tape it is now this time code as well is looking at the sync signals that are recorded on the tape through the control track uh but luckily it should slow down the rewind which is what it's doing as it gets close to the start so it doesn't like yank the tape out of the um you know the spindle has the tape the leader is stuck in there and if it's going too fast i can just pull that right out so it slows way down as it gets to the starter end there we go so you don't have a really horrible abrupt stop okay let's hit play now this tape there we go is actually super vhs et oh okay uh on okay well when we look here at the front is this even visible on the camera it says svhs right there sp um it was saying dps whatever that top menu item was it popped up on the second was flashing i wonder if that's some kind of thing that tests your tape quality automatically and adjusts the tracking and all the levels and stuff that might be what's happening there so i recorded this tape myself and there's just a bunch of black at the beginning because uh the front of this tape's a little crunched up because i've tested in other vcr's and it's got a little mangled so although it looks pretty good here so let's uh turn up the audio here so far so good i don't hear any buzzing or anything i mean this vcr appears to be working perfectly as this is awesome great find for 10 bucks at the at the old thrift store while we wait i am going to take some windex here just start to give this thing a little bit of a clean this shiny fake metal plastic certainly gets scratched up and dirty looking well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's analog basement there it is today's video we're going to be trying to fix this ibm 9-inch vga monitor so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] this ibm nine-inch monochrome vga monitor is incredibly cute just look at the design of this thing so looking at the picture it's pretty good although it just seems like it's a little wavy like that vertical line there on the edge of the monitor let's see if i can pause how does the pause look where's the pause on here pause here it is all right that's a little jumpy yeah some of the vertical lines there while i was playing were just a little not perfect and that could of course come from the recording vcr because this is not a commercial tape i recorded it on another vcr an older vcr but yeah it's uh so this is the like frame advance and it's it's not great although it's weird because this tape does the exact same thing in the other vcr so that could be the way the other one the panasonic one recorded this i don't know you get this little bit of static at the top let's see if i can okay so that's fast forward at one you know there's probably two speeds of fast forward if i push it again nope that's it there's one speed to fast forward and let's hit play that looks good though that's the four heads in action play rewind all right that looks good too i mean you know this little bit of uh broken up stuff is completely normal for vhs hit play quality looks good and of course like i said this tape here is not super vhs at all and that's the svhs et mode in effect so it's recording super vhs signals onto a normal high grade tape which of course by the end even the cheapy tapes are high grade so you don't even need that little piece of tape you know or drill out that hole like i have done on this tape you don't need that because it can actually just record oh yeah that's what i'm talking about that could be the monitor to be honest actually now i think about it um but anyhow super vhs quite a bit more high resolution than regular vhs and the fact that it records on the regular tape is actually quite a boon so if you're going to be using a vcr and you find one with super vhs and you are going to record anything i mean like why would you be recording stuff like if you're weird like me maybe you would but yeah that that's playing back really really well nice uniform no weird color like blotches or anything happening the audio was good let's just try again and luckily white phosphor screens like this will surely be are pretty resistant to overall fading i found their their longevity sounds all right now i'm curious is there a way to change the tracking without the remote sometimes the channel up down button does it yes it does cool okay well we actually lost the picture entirely went to a blue screen and you push the up down button here is there a hi-fi indicator on here you know there was not actually i figured it would say hi-fi and usually when the tracking is off you lose your hi-fi let's see go the other way pushing the down channel there we go okay this particular mechanism on this vcr is a little bit more compact than the panasonic ones i'm used to this is for attention to tape right here push on it it actually removes the tension from the tape actually it's funny how it's not causing it to break up there we go see how it's breaking up that's because uh if you don't have the correct tension on the tape it's not going to be pulled against the head properly so there we go we're losing a bit of picture on the top and of course if i uh put let's try to slow down the head a little bit see what it's doing there oh that's kind of a neat effect let me zoom in here so you can see that a bit better when i slow down the head a little bit see it moves it side to side and if i put the audio on really strong oh there it is 14 kilovolts right here on the crt so that's what the high voltage runs at which is right down there this is a transformer here that makes weird audio noises as well and that's just the hi-fi that's losing sync to the uh it's an fm carrier that records the audio in hi-fi to the tape you know that underlying signal i was mentioning earlier it's stored as a or it's written as an fm signal so of course you can actually get static and noise on it um if you have problems with just like you would on the radio right so me messing with the head there was causing that so definitely i am stoked that this vcr seems to work really well without any issues so yeah all i need to do really is maybe order a new belt although maybe this one wasn't slipping what i may do is just boil this in some water and i'll reinstall that back on here but pretty sweet now i have a super vhs vcr and when i hit it it causes the picture to glitch now i found a super vhs vcr that's compact and little that totally works that i can uh put upstairs under my tv and 10 bucks can't be beat it's crazy if you look on ebay right now prices for these are like silly really expensive and i think because a lot of them are just broken or don't work anymore so finding a working one is is pretty sweet and i think by the time this was made in 2000 things were really really cost reduced but it doesn't necessarily mean it's like super unreliable either there's a lot less complexity in this machine if you see older vcrs they have like circuit boards all around the top and on the bottom and like boards all over the place a lot more going on a lot more to go wrong this thing has a little power supply it has some of these boards here it'll have some chips and surface mount stuff on the bottom and that's it like the mechanism is all self-contained pops out really easily for service you know the head connects with this ribbon cable there's it's all relatively simple stuff so there's the same amount of mechanical necessities where like moving the tape around and tensioning is all the same as the very first machines but the first ones accomplish it with a lot more mechanical complexity and relays and solenoids and they sort of engineered all that complexity into just some little plastic parts that are what's on this so yes it's all plastic but i think it's all nylon so it should be relatively reliable and yeah anyways there you go i'm curious if you've ever worked with vcrs like this or like this particular mechanism and you're aware of like potential foibles or problems that always seem to go wrong with it definitely let me know in the description i'll be very curious about it i know very little about vcrs like i've sort of learned quite a bit from 12 volt vids watching his channel and he has just a lot of cool background information on what it was like to fix these things back in the old days and he runs across things especially like betamax stuff that he cannot repair because there are gears that break in there and some of the mechanisms and they're not replaceable at this point in time and therefore the whole vcr is just junk like it becomes parts to fix another one maybe but because that i think there's one particular set of vcrs where it's always the same gear that's breaking or maybe it's actually a sony vhs one that does that either way when it dies that's it it's now toast and i'm sure a vcr like this while it works right now if it's not a belt that you can replace and some other piece of plastic that has sort of fallen apart and just degraded that's the end of the line for it unless we can 3d print replacement parts which you know maybe in the future it'll be a lot easier to do that but at this point you know these things are going to work until they're dead and that's going to be that so if you have tapes that have stuff on them that you really care about i really advise you to try to get the footage off the tapes onto a digital medium on put it on safe cloud storage hard drives whatever multiple places so you can keep that footage because there will be a time when the vcrs are all broken and the tapes are degraded like the magnetic oxide has come off and they don't work anymore so yeah this there's a limited amount of time i think for this stuff to work and i guess that is it so if you thought my little funky interluded to a vhs vcr was interesting thumbs up and if you didn't and you hate this kind of video you know you thumbs down or skip it or whatever thanks my patrons really appreciate the support you give me this is my second channel so a subscriber would be hugely appreciated the subscribers the number of subscribers like that that hitting that button is really what tells youtube that you're just interested in the channel and it seems like when you have a low number of subscribers it really doesn't suggest your videos to people very much but when you have a high number it it helps get the the word out there a lot of views come from the recommendations that youtube shows it's not so much from the actual subscriber hitting that button like you as a subscriber you get you know pops up on your feed but it's more like a general interest thing and my second channel which of course has way less subscribers on my main channel uh the videos which can often be you know similar they're me right they just get a lot less views so anyways that is it so stay healthy stay safe and i'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement ][

Views: 172,786

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Id: dE0L82hCQ5w

Length: 50min 21sec (3021 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022