Alice in DVHS-Land

"...that's how it always begins. Very small." 

-Egg Shen- 

Did you know that the first truly high-definition consumer video format was neither HD-DVD nor Blu-ray, but instead a version of VHS that predates both of them by at least four years?

The Entrance to the Rabbit Hole

For the last twenty-three years I have watched The Transformers: The Movie on (or very close to) my birthday. It started as a silly ritual and even grew tiresome once or twice until the addition of a wrinkle: each year right before my birthday I would find some novel way to watch it. One year I watched it on an airplane using a Royole Moon personal cinema, one year I watched it on a Sega Genesis using a Mega Everdrive Pro, one year it was on Laserdisc on a CRT etc...  At a certain point in that journey I decided I wanted to revisit my original experience.  The first time I had ever seen the film was when my parents rented a VCR and I got to pick out a movie from the rental store - it was an original FHE VHS with the trademark green-on-silver label.  And that's when the trouble began...

Finding a good VHS copy on Ebay is very hit-or-miss.  The market goes in waves. One month people will only sell them at insanely overinflated prices, and the next you can get nice deals.  I started looking during an "insane" period, so I settled for a pretty ratty looking copy - hoping that the film itself would still be watchable.  When it arrived I popped it into my Samsung VCR and watched it.  It was obviously a little worn, but for the most part it was watchable.  Then at the very end of the movie, the sound stage opened up, the voices were clearer, the music was clearer it was then that I noticed that the player had not been playing the Hi-Fi audio track for the entire film, it was only at the end of the film that it started working.  Since the tape was obviously worn, I started looking for another copy in better condition. Thankfully by then I was able to get a good deal on a very clean looking tape.  When I got it, the picture quality was much better than the first, but the Hi-Fi audio track still wouldn't play.

To attack this problem, it was important to know how the signal is physically imprinted onto a VHS tape. While the picture and "standard" audio is recorded in diagonal slices across the tape, the sync signal (a.k.a. control track) and the Hi-Fi audio tracks (a.k.a. "linear audio track") are recorded linearly along the top and bottom of the tape.  The tape has to follow a very particular path inside the machine to be properly decoded, but drops and heavy use can cause VHS players' tape path to go out of alignment. Too high or too low, and the edges of the tape drag against parts of the mechanism causing not only incorrect playback, but physical damage to the tapes.  Just the same, the magnetic imprint is still present on the tape.

There are quite a few old forum discussions still available with folks discussing the best players for getting old video off of unreliable VHS media.  Towards the end of VHS's life, the custodians of the technology did a lot to try to innovate.  Super VHS was a niche, but demonstrably higher quality format with backwards-compatible players.  Consensus seemed to be that S-VHS players were more capable than standard players even with standard VHS playback.  Much was made about Time-Based-Correction (TBC) and the most desirable players all had this feature which would sometimes make tapes that had grown unplayable due to a worn or damaged control track playable again.  There was also anecdotal evidence that they were better at decoding Hi-Fi audio tracks which were already tricky to begin with before wear and damage was factored in.  

Decision Point

During my search for a good S-VHS player, I was reminded of the last gasp of the VHS format before it accepted its fate and began to fade - the short-lived D-VHS format.  D-VHS players not only supported recording and playing S-VHS tapes, but they incorporated digital recording options.  Early D-VHS players were designed for transferring digital camcorder footage, or OTA, digital cable, or digital satellite video as an alternative to a DVR.  Later (in 2002) D-VHS players incorporated a commercial home video format called "D-Theater" which offered commercial films in high definition years before HD-DVD was a thing.  These players also offered Time-Base Correction (TBC) features when it came to standard VHS playback among numerous other enhancements. 

If I was going to get a better VCR to play my tape, it seemed like S-VHS would be a middle step, so I decided to go straight for D-VHS.  And if I was going to shell out for a fancy VCR, might as well make sure I could check out the commercial releases on the format, so my first foray was with the first D-VHS model to support D-Theater - the HM-DH30000U.  I only paid a couple hundred dollars for it, the unit arrived in decent shape and seemed to work perfectly.  It didn't fix my The Transformers: The Movie tapes at all - in fact playback of those tapes was worse than it was on my old Samsung VCR.  However when it came to undamaged tapes, the video and audio quality was astounding.  It re-ignited my interest in VHS as a format in general, and is the main reason that I decided to collect all of the "Big Box" VHS releases of the Transformers TV show.

My modest collection of D-Theater tapes. I tried to limit my collecting to things that I didn't already own on other formats - which I did except for iRobot.  Love that movie.

It's NOT Capacitors. It CAN'T be Capacitors. It was Capacitors...

For a couple of years I was perfectly content with my HM-DH30000U player.  I used it mostly for standard VHS because I only had a couple D-VHS titles. However one day I went to play a D-Theater tape and found that it would not go more than a couple of seconds without the image breaking up.  

D-VHS uses the MPEG2 codec just like DVD.  When the stream starts carrying bad data either because the media is damaged or there's a problem with the media reading process, the screen turns into blocks and the picture comes and goes.  Regular VHS titles still played back fine.  

Without going into the whole troubleshooting process, if your D-VHS player image breaks up a lot while playing D-Theater, starts "calibrating", or refuses to play D-Theater at all, but regular VHS seems fine, it's probably bad capacitors in the power supply.  Evidently the MPEG2 decoder is on a separate circuit from the analogue playback, so it was affected first.  

After rebuilding the power supply and confirming that the VCR was back to functioning perfectly, I bought a cheap HM-D30000U that wouldn't power on.  The thinking was that future troubleshooting would be simplified by having a second player to rule out things like bad tapes, bad cables etc...  It seemed pretty likely this junk unit was suffering from the same problem, and I had already bought double the replacement capacitors when I fixed the first one.  This second unit proved to be a different issue.  The capacitors were definitely failing in the power supply, but it also had a faulty power regulator that was, of course, long since out of production with no viable substitutes. Tracking the problem down forced me to learn a lot about how power supply circuits are designed.  In the end I had to resort to buying a lot of about 10 regulators from one of those shady Chinese websites that has four or five different names for the same storefront.  The seller was very communicative and wanted to confirm that this was the exact part I wanted.  There was no way to confirm the parts were genuine, but since there was no alternative source it didn't matter.  Thankfully the regulators were genuine, and got the second HM-D30000U back in action.

The Upgrade Itch

While the HM-D30000U is a perfectly good machine, it was released before the first D-Theater films were even available, so it is missing some of the features of later machines.  About mid-way through the short production run, D-Theater titles started shipping with multiple audio tracks, but this model can't decode them.  Also, the digital audio output only outputs audio from D-VHS or Firewire sources, so connecting this to a DVR requires that you connect both the analog and digital signals.  Contemporary AVRs of the time had auto-detect features that would use the analog input but switch to digital when it was detected, but this isn't so much of a feature nowadays.  Even if it had been, my AVR doesn't have component video inputs, so I had to use a YPbPr to HDMI transcoder.  This meant I had to define VHS as two different inputs depending on whether I was playing D-VHS or standard VHS.  When I incorporated a Sony 4K projector into my media setup, I found that it would not display standard VHS content because the player output the native 480i resolution, and the lowest the projector would support was 480p.

Stolen Glory

This got me to start looking at the later D-Theater models - two of which actually had HDMI outputs which was crazy exotic for 2003/2004.  I managed to get an HM-DT100U, which is the top of the line most feature packed D-VHS player ever released.  Its only flaws were a dying power supply and weak analogue audio output.  

The HM-DT100U - like nearly every D-Theater VCR, it has a shiny cover that has to be flipped down to access the cassette slot.  It's almost like they thought people would be ashamed of something that looked like a VCR on their component shelf.

The serial number of my stolen HM-DT100U - 149H0169 if you see this floating around out there, let me know.

I set about trying to repair it, but made some mistakes along the way.  I replaced most of the electrolytic capacitors - the power supply, the main board and the digital board.  The process of removing the SMD capacitors from the digital board damaged a couple of the tiny 10mH coils, and (I only learned later) I got some debris in one of the connectors that attaches the playback heads. The player would physically load and spool a tape, but there was no video from it. Disappointed with myself for damaging such a valuable piece of equipment, I shoved it in a box and tried not to think about it until I could come back to it with fresh eyes.  At one point I decided to sell it, but my honesty about what had happened drove away every potential buyer except a known scammer who has a documented history of buying goods then filing a damaged goods claim and sending back an empty box.  A month or so after the scammer tried to buy it, I saw a listing on Ebay for repair services that listed several JVC VCRs including this one.  It was a risk but I decided to take it.

To make a long story short, I never got my VCR back.  It was evidently stolen from a UPS store in Boca Raton, FL.  The shop compensated me since it was their mistake, but I was back to square one trying to find a D-VHS player with all of the necessary features.

When is a Downgrade not a Downgrade?

Unfortunately DT100U VCRs are very rare and I wasn't able to find one after months of looking.  What I did find, however was the next best thing - the HM-DH5U.  As far as I can tell it's functionally identical to the HM-DT100U, except it does not have a built-in HDTV tuner - a feature I had no intention of ever using anyway.  The front of the HM-DT100U has a cover designed, as far as I can tell, to conceal the fact that it's a VCR and make it look more like a DVR.  The HM-DH5U does not have a flip-down cover and very obviously looks like a VCR - a look I much prefer. In fact, it's the one complaint I have about all of the other models of D-Theater VCR.  I want the components on my shelf to be recognizable as what they are, and I simply don't understand JVC's seeming obsession with putting faceplates over the other models.

When the HM-DH5U arrived, I was not optimistic because many of the case screws were missing or had been haphazardly replaced with obviously wrong screws.  God only knows what someone might have done to the insides of it.  It seemed inevitable that I would need to rebuild the power supply etc...  However, it was in almost perfect working condition.  The only oddity - something I have not yet worked out - is that the remote control cannot power the unit on or off.  The power button on the front panel works normally, and all of the other remote control functions work normally except power.  

After testing for a few hours to make sure everything was working as expected, I didn't even bother to open it up.  However the minute I placed it in my component rack, it "ate" a tape.  The nightmare continues!  My mind raced with what might have gone wrong.

My experience working on VCRs prior to falling down the DVHS rabbit hole was basically limited to cleaning the heads with IPA and a piece of paper.  This experience has forced me to learn a lot about how these devices work.  In this case I had to start figuring out how to remove the loading mechanism to extract the stuck tape.  The service manual explains this process, but it still took a while to understand exactly what had to be done.  The face plate needs to be separated by un-cliping the tension tabs, then the tape caddy needs to be removed by unfastening two black screws at the base, then sliding the caddy forward (towards the center of the mechanism) and tilting upwards (towards the middle of the mechanism).  If you don't spare a finger to keep the tape's cover open, it'll shut and crease the tape.

After getting the tape out, I began the troubleshooting process.  It turned out that a foam packing peanut had made its way into the mechanism.  Bits of it were stuck to the grease on the top side of the spindle transports and jammed into one of the tape guides.  A large chunk had worked its way to the underside of the tape mechanism, become lodged under the spool belt and caused the belt to fall off its track.  Since the seller who shipped this to me had not used foam peanuts, the peanut that wrecked my day had been floating around in there for a while and likely shifted when I moved the VCR to install it into the rack.

A styrofoam peanut lodged into the tape path.  Not seen: the remains of the peanut which worked their way to the underside of the tape mechanism and dislodged the spindle belt causing the VCR to "eat" tapes.

It took a couple of tries to get everything re-assembled correctly, but once I did everything began working perfectly again.  I replaced all of the exterior screws with some that very closely match the originals, did some tests and installed it.

The HM-DH5U not only lets me enjoy the alternative audio tracks on D-Theater, but it also solves a couple of other challenges I had with the HM-D30000U.  

Firstly it has an option to convert all 480i content to 480p - which is the lowest resolution my Sony VPL-VW295ES 4K projector will accept.  With the HM-D30000U this meant that I could not watch standard VHS content with my projector.  I tried a couple of different scaler solutions, but finding one that would properly line double 480i but pass 1080i through untouched proved to be much harder than I would have expected.  This feature ONLY works with the analog component outputs and not through the VCR's built-in HDMI output.  It seemd like a weird limitation until I remembered this was released in 2003, well before HDMI was a common feature.  It was also not a problem since I already had a pretty capable component-to-HDMI converter. 

With the HM-D30000U, the digital optical output would only provide audio from D-Theater/D-VHS.  Sound from standard VHS was only output through the analog audio outputs.  This meant that I had to defined two different devices in my Anthem AVR - one for D-VHS which used the digital audio source, and one for standard VHS which used the analog audio source.  The HM-DH5U digitizes the audio from standard VHS and sends it through the optical audio output so now I only need a single source.

In the end was it worth it?  For me yes, but whether it will be worth it for you comes down to a couple of preferences.

As hard as it may be to believe, there's still content that is only available on VHS.  Sure, you can usually find a copy someone has "digitized" somehow, but in my experience none of those have matched the quality of the output from one of these VCRs.  The image processing for standard VHS in these D-Theater decks is next-level. The color separation and contrast are nothing short of fantastic (comparatively speaking, of course.)  Assuming that the tape doesn't have a damaged "time code"/sync track, I have never seen a cleaner or clearer picture from VHS.  If you're going to try to "enjoy" VHS on a modern high-definition display, I can't recommend them highly enough.

If you're going for a purely analog experience and still using standard definition CRTs, the enhancements don't translate as well IMO.  The color separation and contrast improvements are still very evident even when just using composite video, however the image stability seems adversely affected. Even with interlaced output modes there's prominent flicker that I don't see with my standard definition VCRs.  I think that's evidence that these VCRs were really designed with modern HD displays in mind. My old Samsung player also handles movies with damaged sync tracks much more capably.

What about D-Theater titles?  It's kind of a mixed bag.  They're collector's items so they're all idiotically expensive if all you want is to have a copy of the movie.  All of the ones I have any interest in have been released on Blu-ray and as far as I can tell all of them have been mastered to better standards on that format. So D-Theater picture and audio is not going to be as good as Blu-ray, and you're going to pay, conservatively, 5-10 times as much to watch them.  However there's something viscerally interesting about witnessing the cutting edge of a piece of technology in person.  For something released twenty years ago when 99.9% of home cinema was DVD-quality or lower, it's quite impressive.