Well I finally got a DVD player/recorder so I could finally get rid of the last of VHS tapes. The recorder is cheap and cheerful, but it’s producing decent results on the finished discs.
However, the VHS side of things…
First up, it appears my aged VHS recorder has croaked. It had been chewing tapes whenever I’d last used it, but when I tried playing tape I now got nothing (however this may have been due to a problem I shall get into shortly). This player had served me well, I’d picked it up in 1996 to play NTSC tapes back when that was a rarer option on UK players.
So I eventually picked up a refurbished display player off eBay for £8.50 to replace it. Unwrapping it suddenly struck me that it might not do NTSC as it only said VHS PAL on the machine, but testing it with the first Gundam movie it played fine.
However when it came to play a tape recorded on my old machine… I got the same problems I’d had before! And when I tried to play the tapes that had played earlier – nothing! Clearly the blank tape had dirtied the head. And sure enough, looking at the cassette, there was a white powdery mould inside the cassette. WOE~!
This problem was in the news earlier this year (admittedly the story had been raised by a company specialising in data backup…). It seems a rash of warm damp summers have raised havoc on VHS tapes.
Anyhoo, a visit to Maplins for a head cleaner has fixed the problem vis-a-vis playing the clean tapes. Not sure what to do about the mouldy ones though. There are ways to fix it, but they all seem more trouble than it’s worth. The good news is all the clamshell boxed tapes seem fine, the bad news is that most the mouldy ones are the ones recorded on supposedly Extra High Grade tapes…