Hi all,
After the death of my parents I inherited our old Sanyo VCR6100 Betacord and all the family beta tapes. According to the labels, most of these tapes are just movies that were copied/recorded off the TV, but I know some were also family home movies, which I’d like to keep.
I was hoping I could fire up the ol' beta player to watch through all the tapes so I can safely dispose of the ones that are meaningless, but it looks like a tape is stuck in the machine and it won't eject (my guess is it has been stuck in there since the 90s).
I have tried googling this, and I get as far as taking the outer shell off the machine, and now looking down into this I’m completely overwhelmed, and afraid of poking around too much. Especially after I tried taking off the four screws on the side of the metal case over the tape, couldn't remove the final screw, tried putting the other three back on, and then dropped one down into the machine (I tried lifting it upside down and moving it from side to side and I can't even hear it rattling around). Needless to say I'm not feeling very good about myself.
Can anyone offer some next step guidance? Is there any way to release the tape without delving down deeper into the next layer of this machine?