A cutomer of mine brought me in a box of tapes that were in a house fire. Not sure how they were stored but over all they survived well.

Most are VHS-C and I can see no visible signs of smoke, water or fire damage on the housings though they do smell of smoke. I am using an older and much hated, but reliable VCR to copy them to DVD and so far there have been no problems.

The other group of tapes in the box are DV tapes, some of which do show some smoke and some clearly show a loss of the oxides from the tape base when I opened the flaps to look.
I am willing to use an older Canon DV camcorder as a player for these, but before I begin are there any precautions I should take? Also, will the player shut down when it reaches areas where the oxide has flaked off, o will it continue playing till it finds data again and start showing video again (this would be prefered).

Is there anyone who specializes in recovering video from tapes such as these as a last ditch effort?

Thanks.

--dES