Philips VR948

The Philips VR948 is a VCR (Video/VHS Tape/Casette Recorder). Most of the problems and solutions here will be the same for many other VHS players. You will probably be able to find a lot of information about these on the internet, but there are a lot of home-remedies out there that don't really solve the problem or destroy the hardware.

The internal electronics and the moving parts are very much alike the Grundig GV 440 (might help you find information and service manuals). A link to a service manual for the VR984:

Reasons for repairing and quick references
You might not want to repair this to put it back in your living room, because magnetic tapes are very fragile and are not very well suited for frequent playing. However it is essential to be able to repair these devices as new devices are becoming very scarce, but a lot of people still have a lot of memories on them. You can digitize these easily using an analogue (CVBS/Composite, Component or S-Video and analogue audio) capture card off ebay. Easy way: on windows, mac and linux you could use OBS screen recorder in lossless mode. A guide for how to capture lossless video and audio on linux for more control:. Or if you really know what you are doing, it is even possible to read out the raw signals of the video and audio heads with an analogue-digital converter and decode them in software (using vhs-decode (forked from ld-decode): ), meaning you can make near-perfect copies without all the processing done by the tape recorders aging electronics.

When an internet source is quoted (starting with: "On the internet it is said"), nobody working on this article has actually successfully tried the solution and it should be taken with a grain of salt. These are here for reference purposes.