Using a multimeter, I thought I’d located the source of the problem(s) with my Samsung VCR – a faulty regulator that would otherwise be supplying power to the drum & capstan motors. I’d ordered a replacement, waited a week for it to arrive this past Monday, promptly installed it… and the VCR still doesn’t work. Whatever the cause actually is, it seems it’s beyond my ability to find. I should have a professional look at it, but their services would probably cost far more than this VCR would ever be worth.
While the Samsung may be a lost cause, at least the Sony partially works. It won’t play my Metamorphoses tapes in color, but it WILL play them, and at this point I was willing to pop one of them in just to see what kind of quality I could expect. What I saw was… a bit surprising.
The jumps in brightness and occasional frame glitches had me extremely worried. Is it because the VCR doesn’t support the color signal? Could it be an issue with my capture device? As long as it’s not in the raw RF signal, this could be a non-issue once I have a Domesday Duplicator.
Another major concern is that the video is interlaced. De-interlacing it may be fairly simple, if my capture device and software hadn’t screwed up. It looks like the device may have converted the PAL signal from the VCR to NTSC, with a vertical resolution of 480i. OBS then stretched that 480i image back to 576i, making it impossible to de-interlace. Normally I would just try again, but the VCR can’t rewind.
I have a (hopefully working) tape rewinder on the way, but until it arrives I’m sort of stuck. I don’t want to use the second tape unless it’s with a Domesday Duplicator, and I don’t want to spend the money on one of those without being able to rewind the tapes.
