Arsvita VHS/VCR Head Cleaner Tape, Video Head Cleaning Kit for VHS/VCR Players, Wet Type, ARVC-3

I bought this for my family because we couldn’t watch the tapes. Figured it might have been the very old player. Turned out the player just didn’t work anymore. Tried using it on another player we had but the tape had got stuck inside. Not sure if I misused it. Luckily the tape did not tear! We played our old tapes to watch and it worked, ig we didn’t need it completely. But we have it just in case we ever do.

I had high hopes for this VCR Head Cleaner Tape, but unfortunately, it turned out to be a complete disappointment. My VCR is in great working condition and is used daily without issues, yet this cleaning tape was chewed up on both attempts to use it. The tape itself feels cheap and flimsy, and instead of cleaning the heads, it nearly damaged my VCR. I followed the instructions exactly, but the tape either got stuck or crumpled inside the machine. Given that my VCR works flawlessly with regular tapes, the issue is clearly with the poor quality of this cleaning tape. I would strongly advise against purchasing this product. It's not worth the risk of damaging your VCR. Look for a better alternative!

Item works well and shipped quickly.

Likely just like you, I have a VHS player that could not properly read tapes. I'm digitizing some tapes that likely haven't been played in decades, and are likely to be very dirty. Low and behold, after the first few tapes, I could not play anything else. No video or audio would come through. TLDR: My heads needed cleaning, shocker. You certainly get what you pay for with this "tape". The reels are loose and feel like there's almost nothing holding them in. My VHS player had a hard time moving it around, and it even gave up a few times (Assuming that it's a safety feature of the player, so that it doesn't rip tapes apart). After a few tries, though, I got it to play, and it did a good job cleaning. Good enough that I now get video and audio again. I did have to manually rewind the tape a bit, though. The reels make this item lose a star, but otherwise it worked as advertised.

Excellent product

As a whole, the unit works as advertised. It cleaned up my VHS player that I hadn't used in years. I was able to convert VHS to digital on dozens of home movies. The tapes and the unit were so dirty, I ended up buying multiple cleaners to use after every couple of tapes to keep up the quality of these 30+ year old videos. Especially the first couple, the quality of the video was awful, but after using the cleaning tape (which came out almost black from all the neglect), the quality markedly improved. The caveats: These units are very cheaply made. In order to make them work properly I had to push my finger in the bottom where the gears are (the part you would turn to rewind it, if too much comes out) and then make sure they are centered. Seems the tolerances are too big and the sprocket wheel tends to slide to one side and get stuck when inserted. I also had to take the cover off the VCR because every so often, even using the above procedure, the sprockets wouldn't align properly once inserted and the cleaning tape would spew out into the inside of the unit. There isn't that much cleaning tape, so it wasn't a big issue. Just annoying. Make sure the tape isn't wound around anything important, eject the tape, manually rewind, align the sprockets and insert again. All in all, you get what you pay for and for the price, it did what it was supposed to do, as long as you are willing to do some monkeying around.

It absolutely works! We have an old Sony VCR and found our old Disney (and others) sing a long tapes from the 80s. They started to stick, jam and yes 1 broke (but we've repaired it). It took some of the alcohol solution with a cloth on the heads and ran the tape with fluid through a few times - and we're watching 40 year old VHS tapes. So glad to find this.

Terrible quality. Cheap and does not work. The tape inside the VHS casing gets stuck and pulls out of VHS case. It only plays for a few seconds and shuts off which does not allow it to clean the VCR heads at all.