New HRS9911U: TBC Problem, VCR or bad tape?

[CaZeek]

Hello,
I recently purchase the JVC HR-S9911U S-VHS VCR. When I put certain tapes in and the TBC is on, the top of the picture comes down a bit, and a black (or very dark) version of I believe the bottom of the image seems to be pushing it. It appears to be some sort of tracking problem. When I turn off the TBC, or play the tape in a normal VCR, this does not occur. I have not tested this with many tapes, but it is happening on several tapes of the same series (retail tapes). It did not occur on the other two tapes I tried of different series. Has anyone else experienced this, or do they have any ideas on how to fix it? Thank you!

[troyvcd1]

Are you viewing this on your pc. If you are then this is to be expected and the tv overscan will eliminate this. If you are viewing on the tv then I dont know.

[CaZeek]

Thanks Troy, that may be it, but there is still a problem. Sometimes the line (I'll just refer to it as the line) shakes the rest of the show or pushes it down, so the final version will be a bit shaky, no? Also, that aside, should I crop out the line or no, because the TV will not show it anyway?

[CaZeek]

It is definitely shaky.. I just tried capping about 15 seconds and it was moving up and down.

[qlizard]

A similar thing happens with my SV10U which also has built in TBC. It only occurs on certain tapes, but it ruins the entire capture because it causes stuttering in the capture. I was capping straight to mpeg so that may have been why it caused such problems in the capture, but the flickering definitely occured on my preview monitor. Strangely, I'm quite sure that on those tapes it didn't occur the first time I played it through on the VCR, only with subsequent playings. Sorry, I haven't found a way to control it, just have turned off the TBC for those tapes.

[Barnabas]

cazeek,

I have the same unit and besides that which you just noticed, the TBC on the unit will cause frame drops on my Hauppauge PVR-250 but not on my Hauppauge AVI capture card. I bought a 2nd TBC to run after the JVC and that gives me the best of borth worlds.

[CaZeek]

I'm wondering then, was this worth the investment, or should I return it? I was under the impression from all the posts, that this was the top of the line as far as built-in TBCs and S-VHS VCRs. I don't want to have to purchase an additional several hundred dollar item to add on to this to make it work. Otherwise, I could have just bought a 100 dollar S-VHS player and a TBC. Any thoughts, or am I missing something?

I appreciate all the input

[Barnabas]

It has VERY nice video output. 1 other great feature of the JVC is the stabilizer, which can make tapes that have stretched starts at the beginning, play without jumping. That alone makes it worth in for me. That won't work with the TBC on anyhow.

[lordsmurf]

There is not such thing as a one-size-fits-all-problems machine. You must have some pretty bad tapes for that to happen. A TBC-1000 is good for eliminating shakes, an offset sometimes caused by the JVC TBC.

Remember, this is restoring. Restoring is trading one issue for a lesser issue. It may take a few trade-offs to get an acceptable image.

Most tapes should be fine, if they are decent to some degree (read: does not need to be perfect source tapes).

I think all of this is covered on my VCR/TBC pages on lordsmurf.com