However the actual amount of new subscribers has levelled off a bit. Not sure how to resolve that, but I'll just keep going. I'm editing another video together right now.

That might be a bad control track, which is a subtly different problem. Is the sound muffled too? If so, that would certainly point to the audio & control head having gone out of alignment.

@@video99couk Nope, audio is fine; no muffling or wavering. It was one of those quite early VCRs that was SP only and didn't have auto-tracking. I guess since the tape was moving up and down in the exact same way on playback (in that machine), the recording played back properly.

In the end I find that getting clean hi-fi audio is the ultimate test of proper alignment. It's very fussy on both VHS HiFi and PAL Beta HiFi.

Yes, I mentioned that as a possibility in the video. If the tape is curled or pushed away from the drum, then it would never work. That's why the experiment of seeing if the noise bar moves with tracking, is useful. If it doesn't move then there's little hope for resolving it.

I think JVC will re-track as required too.

I've heard of the RF decode project but not had any experience of it. With the amount of tapes I have to get through, this route probably wouldn't be practical. I have occasionally loaded VHSC tape into a VHS shell for special reasons, such as a disintegrated VHSC spool.

regarding point 1: older and cheaper vcrs indeed do have separate head amps, but they lack quality, because they're old, so you can't beat newer models anyway, and newest vcrs (or better to say latest to be released) don't even have separate head amps, everything is integrated into video processor, you can reach rf because those chips have rf monitoring pins, but these vcrs are too new to have decent image qulity, so it's kinda moot, because those "newer" models (but not the newest) already have quite decent and sharp image, nothing to improve upon..... and another way of getting less vertical roll is putting tape in another machine. call it poor man's tbc. also, given the amount of tapes i capped without tbc, i doubt i'll be wanting one soon.

@@ivok9846 The issue with the last gen VCR'S however for VHS is the lack of HiFI FM test points, you have to go tapping IC pins, tbh there is very little real world diffrance between a 90s unit and a 2000s unit on the amplifyer ICs head conditon makes a more major diffrance, after the last 2 years of seeing hundreads of decks tapped its pretty clear at this point as i've tried to document on the vhs-decode hardware install docs. If you think there is nothing to improve on for the ICs new and old then your pretty mistaken, if you think there basband output is perfect then when you see vhs-decode has full demodualtion and baseband processing control stanges it beats out any modern ADV (analog devices) chips. At the end of the day RF capture beats out hardware TBCs alongside any hardware Y+C/CVBS to YUV converters used before or during the AD conversion process, the only factor that matters today is if x deck can track a tape and x decks heads are not worn down, at 16-25GBP to get into and with it I urge you to try the FM RF archival method, I have a basic video on it and there is a extensive wiki unlike when I made the orignal comment nearly 3 years ago now.

​@@TheRealHarrypmpanasonic nv-hv60 has hifi fm test points, but it's already too new to be any good, if panasonics were ever really good. it doesn't have separate head preamp at all. as for head condition, i think it's doesn't make much difference, knowing what i did to my oldest vcr (35 years old, still works) and how it kept going over the years. i mean....better not to discuss it.....if you were to find unused and machine with 1000hrs i doubt differences would be great. or even perceptible. i dunno if it's even possible to find worn heads vhs machine, the tape is pretty soft. maybe on machines that were working full working hours, ie 8h every day, but not on home machines. it would be interesting if we could swap a vhs tape, you capturing it via RF and me via my old system, and then compare the two, but...like i said, sharpness via slv-e730 and philips saa713x based capture card is not an issue at all. i kinda doubt i would get better results with sanyo vhr5100ee from 1989 and vhs-decode. why? because sanyo must have worse heads of the two. even when it was new. and worse RF pre-amp. not deteriorated, just worse..... regarding virtual tbc (i presume vhs-decode is doing): yes, digital system can align scanlines beginning, but it still can't align perfectly the complete line, because of magnetic tape non-linearities and stretching, ie every line has some horizontal wiggling going on, this will be visible when recording signal that has vertical lines in it, for example subtitles etc. i'm just watching "vhs-decode vs 3 others: TBC stress test (Crafters)" on yt (and i see your comment), and it seems it's not even doing aligning of scanline start i just decribed above. maybe the recent version has tbc. (must say, i like the amount of taskbar icons in your "VHS Decode, ld-analyse & tbc-video-export A Basic User Guide - Windows (2024)" guide.) i mean i don't mind the command line (because i was using and still use avisynth..that would be father and mother of QTGMC...heh) but i don't have tapes with tbc issues.... gosh, those are high data rates, as i expected......280 or 560mbps.... it seems you're including some sort of drop-out compensation, we were doing that via avs filters.....in 'doom9 analog capture guide', i wrote the chapter '13 Removal of clicks and scratches' (linked in '7.2.3 Removal of clicks and scratches'. in 7.2 Processing the video using AviSynth chapter). that's a good thing, i had some kodak tapes with plenty of drop-outs. in your "Visual Comparisons" on wiki, all "conventional methods" pics look like some ridiculously crappy usb-mpeg2 capture device that's not even preserving interlacing, so image is vertically polished, blurred, ie it's not even full resolution, those camera date/time captions reveal that. most of my captures look like those bottom pictures. the "Lorrane Wedding Tape" looks like it was captured with contrast setting during capture cranked all the way to the max, so everything went black. better to do less contrast than more during capping, because more means unrecoverable erros like these. regarding linear(mono) audio, it gets a bit complicated, right? i mean you need external clock hooked up to 2 cx cards, right? why didn't you solve that in software too? usually capture utilities(vdub) can resample audio to match video clock, or vice-versa. ie the actual capture utility that puts both rf (video) data and audio from pc sound card into one file you later process....

@@ivok9846 I should have also stated, its not really about just VHS anymore either, Betamax, SMPTE-C, EIAJ, Philips VCR, Video8, Hi8, Umatic are all also thought about and have RF capture users, there is a lot of interest for 2" Quad which is in the roadmap of future support, I just did a few video8 tapes this week and they look as good as new recordings do with the last update to decode. Feel free to email about doing some back and forth comparisons, top of the wiki homepage. The TBC on vhs-decode is not virtual is basically the same as what's in a FPGA in terms of video handling its not doing it on a decoded YUV image but during creation of a demodulated CVBS/S-Video signal stream on file, its had the same TBC power as ld-decode since day one they both share the same core code and processing speed hits in that regard a "full frame" tbc in simple terms. Ah the crafters tape is a mess, for 2 reasons 1 its a 14.3msps capture not an 28msps capture off a CX Card the bare minimum for capture of NTSC/PAL RF on those cards is 20msps you can get away with 16msps for NTSC or 18msps for PAL if re-sampling after the fact and the tape is within format spec ish, but if you capture under those minimum rates that's it there is zero hope of current code playing nice with that as the signal data is just not all there, so that tape irritates me to no end its a true bad capture in terms of ingest and in terms of a valid test case. (this was before guidelines were established for safe rates) The last 2 videos I made are actually already outdated, not behind the current docs, but will be very soon with new updates coming to the tbc analyse tool (ld-analyse) and making a new video on the clockgen setup, actually most of the icons are standard tools mentioned in the wiki it was a Easter egg there is like 10 more things on there as I have a 21:9 ultrawide panel but used a 16:9 one for the video. I will admit those example snips are just mostly there as a "oh wow" factor thing for people without any real experience, the TB's of raw data available is the you want a real example here have fun sort of thing, people asked for some pictures so they were added there but they are full images, you can open in a new tab and pull them down manually or use the compare links for fun haha. (also the NV-HS950B TBC I found to be utterly unreliable sometimes, that example was made as a joke when LS started to say decode was vapourware, without trying it before getting all hostile about his little TBC market, I was saying decode wins when I had a FORA310P fully working in my capture chain, when you can adjust CVBS/S-Video signal portion in post or not even need to at all well that just kills having to deal with hardware) The decode process provides signal level data like you would have from RF out on a Umatic deck fed into a TBC, ld-dropout correct is akin to a video filter although its applied to the raw GREY16 CVBS/S-Video TBC files in a isolated manner via export tool or a permanent manner via running ld-dropout-correct directly. For audio the current clockgen setup has a little PCM board for linear audio capture, Its notable some members are working on a direct linear head method so you could get a HiFi deck to do standard output + HiFi RF + linear , but yes 3 files 40msps 8-bit for Video, 10msps 8-bit for HiFi and the last one being a 3 channel audio file with L+R+Headswitch they are all captured off the same clock in sync, now how you go about alinement is upto the user via auto audio aline or any other tool really there is going to be some methods added to the export tool at some point to just streamline this process even further, and there is a new version of the DdD coming to the main docs soon which is duel channel + has provisions for a 4ch balanced audio ADC setup added to it. I will note I do V210/PCM then encode to FFV1/FLAC with an Blackmagic SDI setup with the DMR-ES10 as a reference capture chain alongside every RF capture I do outside of quick testing stuff. Regarding final archival file sizes, we FLAC compress the RF and only keep the decoded .JSON metadata file + encoded FFV1/FLAC media, the S-Video/CVBS .tbc files are not required to live forever after exported metadata from the VBI space is delt with if any, the standard practice here it to note the commit/command used and purge the .tbc files after you can always re-decode from source RF later on.

Yes I reckon from the model number, it probably was the first of very close. It's too shoddy really, my only pet hate is the poor screening on the cable from the A/C head.

If it didn't work at all, then it would have implied that there was an unrecoverable recording defect such as if the tape had been curled during recording so it didn't touch the video head. Or possibly that the error was too huge to compensate for, which I have very occasionally had with Video8. It would be rare for both guides to shift, but not impossible.

Setting up the tape path on a 2x4 will require the service manual. Probably involves a test tape and switching off the DTF. V2000 machines can develop tracking faults for reasons other than bad tape path, typically due to DTF circuit failure. It's complex and prone to failure.

It might be that the player is not receiving any tracking pulses. Have a look at the tape, you may find that one edge of the tape has ripples on it where it has been damaged, and this is preventing good control pulses from being picked up by the A/C head. This stops the capstan servo from working and causes the problem you describe.

Actually it was a DAT machine, but the principle is almost identical. One of these, but I'm not sure which right now: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/idmdnsWkqKmUmas.html kzfaq.info/get/bejne/gpiThrBn1c2no2g.html

Some older PAL machines won't play all NTSC tape speeds, but this relatively recent machine would. As it happened the tape was SP recorded anyway. I hate VHSC too, it was a bodge-up. What I didn't mention here was the PAL machine would play in pseudo-PAL and the TBC has to convert to true NTSC for capture, so the NTSC line/frame rates are preserved for full quality.

My very old (late 70s-early 80s) JVC and Panasonic multi system machines will only play SP. The LP speed in NTSC was never officially supported by JVC. Matsushita was forced to create it so that they could sell VHS machines in North America with 4 hours of recording time.

@@crashbandicoot4everr Ok, Lots of PAL multi standard machine like my 2004 Funai, My LG combos, My Samsung will play the Ntsc SP and EP tapes I recorded in The RCA VCR from the US I got however they wont play the LP tape I tried recording in The RCA, The LP tape I recorded plays fine in my Grundig and Sharp tho. I think it is quite weird that some PAL VCRs will play the Ntsc EP but not the LP speed do yk why this is? As far as ik all pre recorded tapes came out in The SP speed tho.

@@SwedishRetroTechNerd The companies that bought their VHS VCR manufacturing licenses from Panasonic all had the LP speed for recording (Hitachi was one of them). The ones that bought them from JVC did not (Sony was one of them). Of course this only applies for North American market machines. Multi system machines were mainly marketed in the Middle East.

@@SwedishRetroTechNerd Fortunately my AIWA HV-MX100 plays all NTSC SP, LP and EP as well as PAL SP and LP, but it doesn't record NTSC LP, I still have an old 1987 GE VCR (made by Panasonic) we brought from Canada that plays and records all 3 NTSC speeds.

Non-trivial I'm afraid. Probably a broken gear beneath the deck. Depends which machine it is though, some Panasonic machines do this when a motor drive coupling splits, which can be glued.

Sorry no I don't repair equipment, I have a backlog of my own equipment to work on. However I can repair tapes, if that is what you are asking for.

Principle would be similar though I have found Beta alignment errors to be quite rare.

On Betamax the drum entrance and exit guides are stationary so there's much less posibility of misalignment.