Found a tape last week that had someone's wedding recorded over a scrambled cable broadcast

I grabbed a box of tapes from a thrift store in Toledo for $3 last month. One of them looked like a blank but it had about 20 minutes of a wedding from 1992 and then it switched to a scrambled HBO movie. The tracking was so bad on the wedding part I had to adjust the heads manually just to see what was happening. It made me wonder if anyone else has found tapes that had personal recordings mixed with random TV stuff. How do you even keep that kind of tape from getting worse over time?

2 comments

2 Comments

faithb7812d ago

@jana_henderson52 I gotta disagree, I've had better luck just storing my tapes flat and not rewinding them at all.

jana_henderson5212d ago

Read a blog post about this exact thing a few months back. Apparently heat and humidity are the biggest enemies of old VHS tapes - they break down the magnetic particles on the tape itself over time. That blogger recommended storing them in a cool, dry place (like a basement closet, not an attic) and rewinding them fully every few years to keep the tape from sticking to itself. I tried it on a tape I found from 1988 that had half a baseball game and half some kid's birthday party, and it actually helped the tracking a little bit. Not a perfect solution but better than nothing!