sda capture blog

when i began to fast forward the second tape of the single seg legend of mana run (i always fast forward and rewind every tape before capturing it to get rid of any sticky spots in the tape), it made a horribly loud noise, like putting your ear next to a motorcycle engine or something. i am not exaggerating at all when i say this noise was far louder than i ever would have expected could be produced by a vhs unit. the noise grew in pitch and volume as the tape sped up, and i feared that something bad was about to happen, so i decided to stop the tape and take it out.

as i tried to pull the tape out of the vcr, my worst fears were realized - the tape was outside of its enclosure and caught somewhere inside the unit. i tried reinserting the tape to see if it would come uncaught the next i ejected it. no luck, but there was more tape outside of the enclosure now, enough to pull the enclosure completely out of the vcr and reach in with my hands to try to dislodge the tape from the inner workings of the unit. luckily, the tape was apparently only caught in one place, and i was able to quickly disentangle it and extract the whole mess from the unit.

once removed, i used my trusty dvd labeling pen to turn the tape's uptake wheel. unfortunately, the tape stopped coming when all the slack was on the uptake wheel. i tried turning the uptake wheel harder, but the source wheel wouldn't budge. i got out my screwdriver set and opened the carriage.

the inside of the enclosure looked normal enough. however, as i turned it over (the screws are on the bottom of vhs tapes for some reason), pieces of the one-way locking mechanism fell out of the carriage. so i had to hunt around for a tiny, thin spring and the white plastic piece it held in place to reassemble the carriage. (the one-way locking mechanism consists of two pieces of plastic and two springs that fit over them. these plastic pieces act like gears touching the two reels, making sure that the tape does not move backwards unless it is being rewound.) after this reassembly i was able to get the source wheel turning again.

when i put the reassembled tape back in the vcr, it made it to the end of the tape fine, but when it tried to rewind, it ate the tape again. i wondered if i hadn't incorrectly reassembled the one-way lock. but some tape was on the source wheel ... so it had successfully rewound maybe a minute or two. that said to me there was something wrong with the carriage outside of the one-way locking mechanism (either that or the uber vcr had failed). i left for work not knowing if the tape would be capturable.

when i got back from work, i opened up a brand new tape i had and began to transplant the legend of mana tape into its carriage. but when i tried to take the legend of mana tape out of its original carriage, i noticed that the source wheel was caught on something. it all made sense when i saw that the metal seesaw-like strip used to hold the reels flush with the carriage had partially broken off of the carriage and was leaning down into the reel. the seesaw strip had become caught in the source reel! no wonder it couldn't turn ... and that also explained where the motorcycle engine noise had been coming from (the seesaw thrashing against the source wheel as the tape wound).

i carefully extracted the seesaw strip from the source reel and set the tape down into the new carriage. the second half of the run is capturing normally now. i expect that there will be a considerable decline in the picture quality in the area of tape that had come outside of the enclosure the first time the vcr ate the tape, though i don't have to worry about the second area, as it was after the run finished on the tape.