My VCR croaked!

[El Supremo]

Since the last one was made in 2016 all my VHS tapes are toast. But they were deteriorating so bad that they were not very good anymore.

I took it apart hoping that it was just a belt. But no, some gears were mangled. After much work I got my tape out.

VCRs had a couple of advantages over DVD/Blue Rays. They started playing right away and you could always pick up right where you left off.

Should I buy a used VCR or forget about my tapes? How do you recycle VHS tapes?

[Karadeniz]

1. If you look at the tapes, buy a replacement!

[El Supremo]

3. I think it has been more than 6 months...

since I watched one. But I wanted to watch one on Thursday and it went blooey.

[CottonBear]

2. Check out local thrift stores, Nextdoor Neighborhood site or look online.

I just gave my VCR to neighbors who still had lots of tapes. Their VCR had just died.

[Va Lefty]

5. Check ebay too!

It's been a few years, but I bought a Sony combo vcr/dvdr RDX-VX555 on eBay. You can transfer vcr tapes to dvd. Still using it.

[brewens]

4. The freakin' heat melted the cylinders for my gramophone. I doubt I can replace those.

[El Supremo]

6. And you can't send a telegram anymore!

[MyOwnPeace]

10. THAT is why I KNEW the Pony Express would rule the day!

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

24. Don't give Louls DeJoy any ideas.

Except he wouldn't use horses. Oxen may be more to his liking. Horses are just too fast.

[MyOwnPeace]

25. He's got a horse's a$$ for a boss......

wouldn't that help?

[Binkie The Clown]

7. Get one of the hand crank ones that plays from a wax cylinder.

[doc03]

8. Can you even buy a VCR new anymore. Mine has

been in a box in the spare BR closet for at least 10 years?
I bought my first VCR in like 77an RCA for $999.99. I bought a new blue ray and gave the old one to my brother. His kids tried to play a peanut and jelly sandwich in it, that finished it off. The old VCR must of weighed 35 pounds.

[sunnybrook]

9. I have alot of experience selling VCRs

Because they are no longer made (for the most part) they are a somewhat hot item for ecommerce sellers like me. Thrift stores are the best bet to find them though it's completely random. I have found that the most durable and long lasting brand is Panasonic. Some Sonys also. One brand with a high amount of trouble seems to be Samsung. You can buy them online through Ebay or Amazon but you'll pay considerably more than at thrift stores. Also I'd bring a VHS tape to try it out before buying. You usually don't get the Remote at thrift stores but most are available online as well. Almost all have original manuals available online as free pdfs. If you buy the VCR online read the description very well to be sure Remote is included. I don't recommend universal replacement remote. Also if you see a combo unit at thrift store test both DVD and VCR part. I would look for a "new" one sooner instead of later because as they get more rare prices will increase. Good luck 😊

[El Supremo]

15. I didn't think of thrift stores.

Cheap replacements from E-bay cost more for shipping than the machine. I guess I'll make a trip to ARC.

[hunter]

11. I bought our current VCR in a thrift store for $10.

It's a nice one too.

I've replaced most of our videocassette collection with thrift store DVDs as well, but not all.

[Jeebo]

12. I still have two functioning Beta machines.

Both of them Sony SL-HF 900s. The one VHS machine I still have didn't work the last time I tried to use it, but I don't know if that was because of the machine or the tape I was trying to play.

I never watch videotape any more, anyway, although I do still have lots of them, both Beta and VHS, and I just can't bring myself to throw the tapes away. Especially the baseball and football games. I am an Alabama Crimson Tide fan and I have lots of videotapes of Crimson Tide games from way back in the late 1970s and 1980s and later. Lots of games that Paul "Bear" Bryant coached. I am also an Atlanta Braves fan and I have most of the playoff and World Series games they were in back in the 1990s. Those are irreplaceable, of course. You can buy movies and whole seasons of TV shows on DVD but you can't buy videos of these games anywhere. I also have some old home movies from as far back as 1988, just after one of my brothers bought a VHS camcorder, and those of course are irreplaceable as well.

So even though I don't watch VHS or Beta videotapes any more, I still want to keep the machines. Just in case I ever want to watch them.

-- Ron

[El Supremo]

14. I always heard that Beta was better than VHS.

You think so?

I really need to transcribe my family's Bell and Howell home movies to DVD. They go back to 1942. My own tape video movies are also now worthless. I copied them to VHS.

[hunter]

21. The quality of consumer grade Betamax recordings is somewhat better than VHS.

The original Betamax machines could only record an hour, which limited the format's usefulness for movie distribution. VHS cassettes could record two hours. The quality of a one hour Betamax recording was superior to a VHS recording.

This one hour limitation was soon addressed in Betamax by slowing down the tape speed and allowing individual frames of video to smear together somewhat more, similar to the VHS format. By most accounts this lower quality picture was still better than VHS.

VHS won out on price because Sony severely limited licensing of the format to other manufactures.

Small video cameras using Betamax tapes revolutionized television news gathering but the recording format used in those cameras was incompatible with consumer grade Betamax cassette players, recorders, and cameras.

[csziggy]

19. My last Beta machine crapped out right when I was getting into transferring to DVD

I still have a couple of videos on Beta tape I'd love to transfer to digital so I can watch and edit them with ease. I'm not sure if I kept the years of Olympic equestrian events (in the time before NBC bought the Olympics and trashed the coverage), but I would love to have those so they were watchable, too.

[Awsi Dooger]

20. I have tons of VHS tapes of old sporting events

Including almost every Miami Hurricanes game in their heyday. I was transferring them to DVD and uploading to YouTube until my channel got shut down due to copyright complaint roughly 4 years ago. That zapped my energy.

I have at least one VCR but haven't checked it in the same time frame. A really great dual deck VHS machine crapped out about a decade ago. That's what I used for high volume events like the Olympics. I have hundreds of Olympic tapes dating to 1980 Lake Placid. Those events got my channel zapped. Olympic Channel showed up out of nowhere and punished everyone without warning.

[El Supremo]

13. Hey! Vinyl records are making a comeback!

When new, they were better than CDs. More frequencies. But they were prone to scratches. I still have a ton and a good turntable.

[whistler162]

16. At least your Victrola is still cranking

[SWBTATTReg]

17. Good luck. They are still still priced, hard to find, and maybe even harder to find someone to fix

them. Perhaps you'll be lucky, maybe get a device that can do the CD/VCR/other combos all in one, and use.

Good luck, I still have four of them, all in fairly good working condition (but I rarely watch the video tapes, as I have CD equivalents of the tapes too.

There seems to still be a market for the Video tapes, I don't know how robust it is, but it is out there...

[TexasBushwhacker]

18. I see them on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace

You can still buy new tapes if you like to record OTA.