I have a JVC DV camcorder (not sure of model number but it's somewhere between 5 and 10 years old) that has started to chew up/unravel my DV tapes on an ad-hoc basis. The last occasion was when I was recording until the tape reached the end and then, when I got home, I connected it up to the television to play it back as usual but that's when it unravelled and got damaged.

The worrying thing this time though is that when I rescued the tape from the camcorder and manually re-spooled the tape back into the cartridge I now get an error straight awy (EC03) when re-inserting the tape and the tape unspools and goes 'crunch' again !

I'm coming to the conclusion that I need to get a new camera (probably stating the obvious !) but will I stand a chance of the new camcorder being able to play this tape or does it sound like the tape has become permenantly damaged ? If the latter, is there anywhere I can take the tape to to get it professionally rescued ?

Also, do I need to buy another JVC camera to be able to play all my recorded DV cassettes ? (yes, I've been stupid enough to keep all my recordings on DV tapes in the cupboard rather than xfer them to my PC and don't want to risk transferring from my current camcorder in case it decides to chew up more tapes....!) or is the format consistent across the DV Camcorder manufacturer base ?

Thinking out loud, what would be an ideal next purchase for me would be some sort of 'hybrid' camcorder that has both DV tape and some sort of 'hard' media storage so that I can use it as a device to back up my existing DV tapes and record new material onto a.n.other media - does such a device exist ?

Sorry for all the questions for a first post....!

Any help/pointers really appreciated,
cheers,
martin