Open your video up!
What goes where? Taking a look inside your Betamax or any video for the first time can be quite a daunting experience. Trying to identify components and figure out which parts of the machine are prone to failure is difficult. It is all very well being told you need to fix an idler, but where is it?

As the animation above suggests, most of what you need to worry about is the mechanical side to the machine. This accounts for the largest percentage of problems. The second largest group of problems is concerned with the power supply. The electronics side of things only accounts for a very small percentage of problems.