VHS tape stuck and won't play? Try this fix

[Music] you know as much as i love vhs tapes and have such warm feelings for old video recordings i can easily admit they were never perfect in a world where we have a high definition tv studio in our pockets every day one that operates in perfect silence because it's all electronics it can be hard to imagine that our vcrs were mechanical devices full of springs and gears and belts and pulleys and sprockets and spinning metal and wires all to play long half-inch strips of plastic with rust particles glued to it there's a lot of stuff that can go wrong of course you already knew that right that's why you're here maybe you have a tape that's stuck right now won't play won't rewind won't fast forward i'll get to some of the causes that might force you to open up the case but first i have a client's vhs tape that's got him in a jam he's been digitizing his family memories and converting them to mp4 but this tape will only play so far then stops he can't go past it he can't play through it he's stuck let's see what we can do about that okay my latest video repair project is this cassette the client says he's been capturing his own video to mp4 but has run into a problem with this tape says it won't play well what can we learn about this hmm this doesn't look too bad you'll notice that the tape is wound nice and evenly onto the spool on the other reel though i see lots of ridges suggests to me i could be wrong this suggests to me that the tape has been played and rewound and played and rewound and played and rewound a lot in this segment and has wound unevenly onto the spool so what i'm going to try to do and i'm not convinced this is going to fix it is i'm going to fast forward as far as i can go actually i'm going to rewind as far as i can go then i'm going to fast forward as far as i can go hopefully to the end and then i'm going to rewind it one more time this tape otherwise looks to be in good shape there's a little button you can push on the side over here that lets you uh flip open the lid tape doesn't look wrinkled or crinkly or damaged or anything so let's give it a go see if the easiest thing fixes it now just to be sure in case uh we come back to this point again where it's causing trouble i'm going to put a mark on here with a dry erase marker so this will tell me that we were about that far so that will be my reference point for trouble in the future with this so let's pop it in the vcr good old panasonic ag 1970 and let's rewind it to the beginning it's ramping up speed sounds like it's going on pretty evenly all right when i get back get so when it gets back to the beginning i'm gonna send it all the way to the end and i'm gonna bring it back all the way to the beginning hopefully that will get a nice even wind onto the tape it's back from the fast forward let's have a look at this tape and see how it wound on the feed side so we see here there's that ridgey part from before and a nice clean wind on that part so see if i can bring all this over to here cleanly and then bring it back over there and then you should be able to play the whole thing through unless there's a problem inside the cash the cassette shell and now we're at the end let's have a look see if this is doing what i'm hoping it's doing okay that reel is empty that reel is full is it smooth oh that's gorgeous so now we need one more rewind pass to move this tape over here hopefully it will do it cleanly if it doesn't if it gets stuck at this mark here then i'll know that something inside the reel is catching but i have high hopes for this oh stop okay we're fully rewound let's pop this out and see if it's a winner look at that one little ridge there but otherwise that looks like it's all cleanly wound on that one's fully empty still attached always good to see i think we're ready to give this a try see if we can capture this whole tape in one pass no dropped frames and then we'll have great news for the client now that's almost a best case scenario it's not always that easy but before you decide to open up the cassette shell try this manually rewind the cassette you've probably noticed that the tape reels don't spin like they do in an audio cassette we used to manually rewind those tapes with a pencil you probably remember doing that vhs tapes and mini dv and eight millimeter tapes too have a break mechanism so that these white reels will not turn in either direction you can release the brakes by pressing here with some kind of pokey thing can you turn the wheels now well it was worth a try now you might have to open things up and i spent about 30 years avoiding that see i too had a tape that wouldn't move this was around 1987. i took it to my dad to fix on his workbench he said sure let's look inside he unscrewed the back pulled off the lid and the insides exploded out like an old game of perfection and because it was 1987 and there was no youtube we had no idea what went where and the whole thing was a total failure that cost me a tape i still think about today back to present time i learned a good trick that saved me from exploding tape guts i'll link to it up there one side or the other and you can use that technique to open your video cassette examine the reel see if anything is broken jammed twisted or blocked if necessary you can sacrifice another cassette and move the reels to another shell take good care of those memories because as i always tell you what gets recorded gets remembered but only if it's taken care of i'm scott the media hoarder if this video taught you something you're my kind of people and i invite you to like and subscribe and follow and join my mission to get everyone's analog era history captured forever on digital thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Scott, The Media Hoarder

Views: 77,019

Keywords: stuck vhs tape, how to fix stuck vhs tape, tape, vhs, vcr, vhs tape won't play, vhs tape wont play, vhs tape wont play or rewind, how to fix a vhs tape that wont play, what vhs tape wont play, vhs tape repair, how to repair old vhs tapes, how to repair a vhs cassette tape, vhs tape problems, vhs tape won't fast forward

Id: 47auHwDiZAw

Length: 8min 0sec (480 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021