This is why your best bet cleaning and restoring stereo VCRs is most important having VHS tapes ripped to computers. even using Topaz Video AI might help improve such and such.

Used to work at LegacyBox/Southtree/Kodak, they're all the same company actually. At least LegacyBox/Southtree are, Kodak probably just has a deal. I mostly worked in the video film department, but did a couple weeks of training in tapes while the film area was being worked on. They have strict, unreasonable quotas for the techs. They hound you for quality, while also hounding you to get things out fast. You don't get the bandwidth to re-run more than 1 or two tapes a night. The stickers are a copout for the digitizers so when they get a bad transfer, the QA checkers send the tape back and set them further behind. Each person has about 40 different machines. If they see noise, they will take it out and move it to another machine to see if it plays better. If not, you just end up getting whatever comes out of the machine. They have techs that can go clean the heads and other repairs, but they work only during the weekday 9-5, so shifts outside of that getting a machine out of their rotation as a death sentence. They do use decent capture cards, I was pretty surprised by that. They use HD PVR 2 model 1512 cards. I didn't inspect the S-VHS machines to see if they actually use the s-video cables in those scenarios. After working there, I have always recommended against sending video tapes there. I would still recommend the video film department, since it's much simpler. Only *reel* issues you get are physical damage to the film. In those cases it's typically a lost cause, since the film curls up and it's just impossible to thread it through the machine without destroying it afterwards. Since they're your memories, if we know it'll break they won't purposefully break it. In a stark contrast to the 40 machines you manage in tapes, you get 4 machines in film. Your machine captures and transcodes everything, so too much multitasking slows down the whole process. Even capturing the film slower. I believe that software would take individual pictures of each frame, then compile into a video. So the end product was the same, just took longer to get it.

Do you find a larger portion of tapes have mould on them in recent years? Here in Australia it's pretty common, especially 8mm tapes.

Hello just found your page searching if vhs tapes can be restored. My parents passses away from COVID in 2020. After finding a vhs tape looking through their things I sent it out to be turned to a dvd through Walgreens, but it came back fuzzy for the majority of the video. Do you think you’d be able to help me restore this tape? 🤞🏼

So this "fragments" at 1:39 are from a dirty recorder head and not from a broken band Im right? The VHS recorder of my grandma has the same artifacts but a bit less on a video from 1997. I plan to save all of out 300+ VHS. So if this is only caused by a dirty head this should be solveable right?

What do you think of Imemories in Arizona? Are you part of that company?

Are you able to fix damaged magnetic film? I paid someone to fix these home video of mine & its still showing really bad

So I have a few vhs tapes that got damaged/ mold and lost the visual quality but has sound. It just looks like tracking lines. Can these be fixed and recovered?

i do the basic Tape Transfer to DVD as well Just have two VCR Decks and DVD Recorders.

Do you also accept tapes from abroad and how to handle the shipping?

Does these VHS tapes used for head cleaning do the real job?

How to clean the video tapes ?