New issue with my JVC HR-S9600U

[dock]

Good afternoon, all! Long time listener, first time caller.

A good while back, during the throes of the pandemic, I set out to digitize all my VHS tapes that I have inherited through my family. I wanted to do it right, so 200+ tabs of reading later, I found a JVC HR-S9600U on ebay and made the purchase. This model was indicated to me to be highly preferable for the task, given it's many modern (for the time) advancements in the technology, albeit ones that probably escape my total understanding.

I am roughly 100 tapes in to my 200-ish tapes for this project, and I noticed that in the last few conversions, it will play as expected for 3-5 seconds, and then begin video tearing from the bottom, which completes to full screen tearing/static looking at the top, where I will quickly see a flash of "No Signal" before it immediately resets and begins showing regular video again. This process repeats ad infinitum and doesn't change behavior, aka, is very regular. Not sure when this began happening, but I'm going back through my conversions to see how much I must re-do.

I've learned basically everything I know about this topic from this forum, especially lordsmurf, so it's time for me to get out of the audience and into the play, so to speak. I'm interested in diagnosing and hopefully fixing this issue, but I'm open to any analyses or suggestions about how best to continue converting all my tapes should this excellent player be kaput.

Thank you in advance for the time. Really hoping for the best

- Dock

[dellsam34]

First of all stop playing your home tapes without opening the lid and look to make sure it is not curling the edge of your tapes, Such damage is irreversible. Sometimes it's an easy fix like swapping a pinch roller, most of the time it is not. If you have never tinkered with a VCR before I'm afraid that this is not going to be an easy task, Without understanding how a VCR works it is hard to troubleshoot its problems, I suggest you find someone locally to take a look at it, If none available you may want to weight between the option to ship it out to someone for repair vs buying another working VCR. Do post a video of the VCR playing non valuable tape and show the mechanism playing the tape while the problem occurring.