Ripple trail on the sides of the tape.

[Caius]

[Attachment 67102 - Click to enlarge]

I need to run a tape, but in a certain part it looks like this. When it reaches this part, the video is either shaky or the image flickers. Can any VCR model solve this or is there something I can do to remove these ripples from both sides?

[dellsam34]

There is nothing you can do, The tape was damaged by a miss aligned VCR and the magnetic layer is severely damaged and lost its magnetic strength (RF level), It depends on how wide the damage is, The first thing to get affected is the tracking pulses and linear audio read by the stationary heads, If it's wider than that it hits the A-B head switch, the VBI, HBI and chroma burst read by the rotating heads, Video tracks should be safe however without the accompanying timing they are kind of not safe.

It will be nice if VHS-decode team makes it possible to control the video drum and capstan motors to generate new timing signals for such bad tapes with corrupted head switch, VBI and HBI signals since the VCR relies on those signals to synchronize the video drum speed and head selection.

[Caius]

There is nothing you can do, The tape was damaged by a miss aligned VCR and the magnetic layer is severely damaged and lost its magnetic strength (RF level), It depends on how wide the damage is, The first thing to get affected is the tracking pulses and linear audio read by the stationary heads, If it's wider than that it hits the A-B head switch, the VBI, HBI and chroma burst read by the rotating heads, Video tracks should be safe however without the accompanying timing they are kind of not safe.

It will be nice if VHS-decode team makes it possible to control the video drum and capstan motors to generate new timing signals for such bad tapes with corrupted head switch, VBI and HBI signals since the VCR relies on those signals to synchronize the video drum speed and head selection.

In a panasonic model vcr, the image does not flicker or disappear, but it looks like it is losing frames.
In the best vcr I have, the d-vhs, the image oscillates and disappears.