Not long. VCRs are helical scan machines; the 3/4" tape you see actually has a bunch of parallel tracks on it with very little buffer. VCRs remain the most mechanically precise instruments ever adapted for home use. "Tracking" adjusts the placement of the read head by the micron. That's pretty tricky in and of itself, especially considering there hasn't been a high-precision VCR made in over 15 years (I had this one). And stacking up those tracks makes them bleed. Set aside the fact that magnetic tape delaminates like a mutherfucker; helical scan means your fields are touching. The smeary look that the hipster kids are calling "nostalgia" is actually just a crisp recording getting old. Recordings made for VCRs will never again look as good as they do now, and they already look loads worse than they did ten years ago.