Love it. Thanks for showing the "real" life and not some super edited video that cuts out the everyday issues you may face.

A non-TikTok workplace is a productive workplace.

Same here, I go through about 3-4 packs of chamois swabs every month. Wish they were cheaper than $0.75 per swab, but….. Love your videos!

The audio head here is for the linear track that is on the edge of the tape. Can be stereo but often mono and low quality. This head also is the control track head. For the hi-fi stereo audio it's on the drum with the video heads. IMO it's worth to transfert both linear and hi-fi audio because on amateur videos it sometimes can be different, some used the dub option of VCR, replacing the linear audio signal with another one, different from the hi-fi audio.

anytime i clean a vcr head with rubbing alcohol it always eats the tape or something goes wrong and then it works normally afterwoods, am i doing something wrong? too much alcohol? one vcr i cleaned the heads on i left it to dry for over an hour and it still messed up a bit.

Hi Phil, thanks for the videos (especially the "that's what she said" quote 🙂). Quick question, the video from my VCR is fine, but there's a scratchy noise from the audio that is annoying. Will cleaning the audio head help with that? Also, do the head cleaner cassettes that you've shown in a few of your other videos do the same thing? Is this (above) a more thorough cleaning where the cassette is more of a "dusting off"?

Is there something other than shammy cloth that you can use? Like micro fiber? or do they scratch the heads?

Hi Phil. another great video. You have many makes and models of player. Do you have a preffered player ? Most seem to have auto head alignment do you find manual is better. Cheers, Ken

Hey Phil, your channel helped me recover and clean 30 years old moldy tapes (VHS, Video8, Hi8 ...) that I needed for a documentary project I'm working on. I'm in Lebanon and there's no one around here that does the kind of job you do, so I had to learn to do it all by myself. It's costly, time consuming and as you always say "fiddly fiddly stuff!" Just 2 questions: 1-Some mini dv tapes are glitching while others are playing smoothly, could it be that the tape is defected due to its age? I ran a head cleaner tape several times in the camcorder and still same results for the same tapes. 2-Do you digitize U-matic tapes? I have one in the collection that I'm working on, if yes, I might consider to ship it all the way to you. Thanks again for all the info and videos! Cheers!

Good afternoon. I've been recently enjoying your videos and I got my own Sony handycam CCD-TRV67. Do you know if my camcorder is capable of digitizing the hi8 footage with a capture card to my PC?

I have this same exact machine and as of yesterday it worked fine. I'm running into a similar issue...I get audio, but no video. But I can see the video when I fast forward and rewind. Any idea? What's even weirder, is that old home recorded off the televesion tapes, work. But any purchased movie, is just snowy video. I figure if the play head was dirty, it wouldn't play the home recorded tapes. So it's more likely alignment...but I figured I'd ask a professional.