Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
I haven’t uploaded the other Blockbuster instore tapes because this machine developed this problem which is common with these models. As you can see, the signal develops noise and momentarily drops out. The time counter is also not counting, and the tracking knob does not do anything though the picture sharpness control seems to still work. If I let it run for a few minutes these problems go away- in this case it didn’t clear up soon enough for me to keep shooting this video without making it overly long, but the problem did go away exactly 12 minutes and 28 seconds into the tape, according to the counter once I rewound it- the counter didn’t start counting til the problem was gone so that’s how much of it ran before it started working again.
There is a servo board underneath the machine which is known for having bad capacitors, and changing those should solve this problem. I had a local shop do this as well as replace a chip, but that did not fix it. The guy there doesn’t know what else to do, he said he spent hours on this and thought it was fixed until it was powered off for a while and the problem came back. He has suggested just keeping it powered on all the time. Not sure if that’s a good idea or not, in any case I would like to keep this machine so if anyone knows what else can be done please let me know!
I haven’t uploaded the other Blockbuster instore tapes because this machine developed this problem which is common with these models. As you can see, the signal develops noise and momentarily drops out. The time counter is also not counting, and the tracking knob does not do anything though the picture sharpness control seems to still work. If I let it run for a few minutes these problems go away- in this case it didn’t clear up soon enough for me to keep shooting this video without making it overly long, but the problem did go away exactly 12 minutes and 28 seconds into the tape, according to the counter once I rewound it- the counter didn’t start counting til the problem was gone so that’s how much of it ran before it started working again.
There is a servo board underneath the machine which is known for having bad capacitors, and changing those should solve this problem. I had a local shop do this as well as replace a chip, but that did not fix it. The guy there doesn’t know what else to do, he said he spent hours on this and thought it was fixed until it was powered off for a while and the problem came back. He has suggested just keeping it powered on all the time. Not sure if that’s a good idea or not, in any case I would like to keep this machine so if anyone knows what else can be done please let me know!
