VHS tape won't feed through VCR

[bigclue]

I've been digitizing a bunch of old VHS tapes, with great success. However, two of the tapes won't rewind or play. They are both of the brand "Ampex", and none of the successful tapes are of that brand. So I suspect there is something about their chemistry that makes them problematic.

The VCR squeaks and sounds like it is struggling when it tries to play or rewind the tapes. I have moved the spools to a different VHS shell, and that didn't help. Neither did removing the rewind gear things.

If I push the rewind release (or remove it altogether), I can rotate the spools to manually rewind without too much difficulty. It might be harder than with other tapes, but not by much. I suspect that the tape just has more friction as it moves through all the twists and turns of the guts of the VCR, and that this strains the VCR until it gives up.

Someone suggested "baking" the tape (what temperature? how long?), which I have not tried yet. Someone else moved their whole reel onto two new spools, which was a pain and didn't help, so I didn't try that, either.

Has anyone else seen this and found a way to solve it? These are old family tapes, and it would be nice to digitize them. Thanks!

[bigclue]

Apparently some manufacturers--and especially Ampex--used the wrong stuff, and moisture can now get in there and gum stuff up. They say that "baking" (literally) the VHS tapes in a food dehydrator at 125 degrees for 8 hours (and then cooling for at least an hour) will cause the trapped moisture to evaporate, and allow the tape to play properly for a few weeks (at least long enough to make a copy or digitize it). So I'll give that a try and report back here...

https://www.tgrantphoto.com/sales/index.php/content/baking-video-tapes

[johnmeyer]

Stop and do more research before you do this!

Sticky-shed syndrome is not normally a problem with VHS tapes. Before you embark on this, read this section in the Wikipedia article about what tape stocks are affected:

Affected stock

Here is the key pull quote from that section:

Blank cassettes from the 70s-90s are unaffected because the hygroscopic binder was not used in cassette formulations.

Actually, read the whole article:

Sticky-shed syndrome

You most definitely should confirm that your tape is actually shedding, as I described in my last post. I expect that you will find that it is not.

[bigclue]

The brand I'm using is Ampex, which is listed under the "Affected stock". And the symptoms listed on that article are exactly what I'm seeing (squealing as the tape scrapes past the playhead and other parts). Plus, I've already moved it to a different case and don't have another option that I know of. (And it's not the end of the world if this goes horribly wrong).

Thanks!

[dellsam34]

Ampex is well known for their problematic tapes, I had read about their R2R audio tapes, VHS and DAT/DDS tapes go bad, I personally had an entire batch of Ampex DDS data cassettes with reels completely locked up and if you force them to turn the tape breaks.

[bigclue]

I want to report that I followed the advice I read and did indeed "bake" my 3 VHS tapes at 125 degrees for 8 hours, in a food dehydrator with a temperature control. I flipped the tapes once halfway through.

I waited until the next morning so they would be cooled off, and all 3 tapes played well! I was able to digitize the tapes onto my computer, and then I tossed the offending tapes in the trash. I appreciate people helping me to figure out to salvage these tapes, as it had some precious things on them, like my brother's wedding reception.

How I digitized the VHS tapes: I used a Sony miniDV camcorder with a "passthrough" feature. I set the "AV->DV" to "on"; plugged the yellow/white/red A/V RCA plugs from the output of the VCR to the input of the camcorder; and plugged the FireWire output from the camcorder to an old MacBook Pro. That was running an old enough operating system that it could still run iMovie HD (the old miniDV version). I pushed play on the VCR, pushed "import" in iMove HD, and captured the whole tape.

Afterwards, I used iMovie HD to trim out the parts of the video that we didn't need. At that point, you could select a group of clips that they want to be one video file (like one birthday party or something), and output it as "full quality" to a filename like "1986-12-21_Judy's 5th birthday.dv". Once all the clips are output, you can delete the iMovie project.

I also used a video converter to make mp4 files out of each clip (with "de-interlace" turned on), which are better for viewing, but kept the .dv files around so I would have a less-compressed version around in case I ever want to use some of this footage for something. (VHS footage isn't all that great of quality anyway, so maybe that's overkill).

[johnmeyer]

Thanks for posting your results. I am very happy to be proven wrong. I will remember now that baking VHS tapes can make them readable.