>useful to people that want to digitise old home videos<

Yeah, I forgot that aspect.

     >tricky tape loading mechanisms. Left too long without lubing the timing could go out causing the tape to bird's nest. Try them out on a sacrificial tape<

Will do.

Rickles:

 

Worth anything these days?

 

Its worth a hell of a lot to the guy that has a lot of old family videos on VHS but no longer has a VCR. I have recently just gone through an exercise of converting/transferring a whole lot of my parent's old vhs recordings onto my hard drive. My VCR had not been used in years and I went as far as even buying a VHS head cleaning tape on ebay to make sure I could grab the best image quality possible. All of this is impossible without a working VCR.

I am sitting too with a whole lot of DAT DDS/DDS2/DDS3 backup tapes which I am hoping to restore sometime too. The price of those old tape drives has shot through the roof but keeping my eyes open all the time for something cheaper. 

Zigg: Digitized all my tapes too, what a pain. One Panasonic VCR dropped dead in the home stretch 😡. And I had to chuck some mouldy tapes.

Tell me about it, its another level of pain but at least you get to save those memories before those tapes become totally useless. 

My father was a prolific amateur videographer - always had a camera glued to his hand for every birthday, Christmas, Easter, Mothers Day etc. Plus we kids were into the performing arts and sport so there were a lot of concerts and sailing races etc recorded.

The net result was that I inherited over 400 VHS tapes, all painstakingly numbered, time coded and catalogued - just consult the index book for "Sumner School Operetta 1987" and it will direct me to tape number 75, and at 1 hour 27 minutes I can marvel at my 10 year old self singing that song about a dog LOL.

He's been gone nearly 15 years but those tapes are still boxed in my garage, as well a couple of his best VCRs and cameras (some positively antique by now, but all functional). One day I will make a start on transferring them to a hard drive. The mind boggles to understand how much disk space (and patience) one might need for that task, and how long it might take.

The one saving grace is that he transferred all his old 35mm films onto VHS - so at least I don't have to deal with them as well! The film of my grandmother shoving a cigarette in my older brother's mouth (when he was about 4) is still a personal favourite of mine 😅

I digress, VCRs are almost certainly worth bugger all now but there will always be someone who needs to get hold of one to take a stroll down memory lane.

Also been there done that. Bear in mind that tapes deteriorate with time. If I had anything precious in storage, I would want to digitise it sooner rather than later.

This VCR has now been tested and works fine, so if anyone wants it, say $20?

Can deliver in Wellington area.

Details:  JVC HR-J695ea
Hi-Fi Sterio
PAL/MESECAM/NTSC
6 Heads
Auto head Cleaner

Bung: With 400 tapes I'd try to sort them. If you just did them in date order you might stop for various reasons leaving real gems undone.

Might be worth it to purchase one of those DVD recorders? That way its just hitting a play on the VCR, and the record button on the recorder. Less fiddling with recording streams, disk space, transcoding etc ...

I'm sure there are people on Geekzone who would do it. I have in the past. Wouldn't want to now, though. 

Rikkitic:

 

I'm sure there are people on Geekzone who would do it. I have in the past. Wouldn't want to now, though. 

 

 

 

400 vhs tapes?