My in-law’s DVD player died. I took it home to see if I could determine why it failed, and while I was looking around inside of it, I saw this fuzzy component. It looks like a trimpot or variable cap to me. Why in the world is it covered in fuzz? I tried attracting the whiskers with a magnet, and they didn’t seem to be ferrous - what could they be? Could this be the dreaded Tin whisker problem gone mad?
(Sorry about the fuzzy photos - I don’t have decent Macro equipment).
Just a WAG, but if that serves any purpose at all, it looks like it would be to provide air discharge points for static. Why they would do that, though, I don’t know, since it’d still be inside the metal case, and you could get the same effect more easily and efficiently by putting a grounded plug on it.
Update.
I took a can of dust-off and blew the “fuzz” away. It might have been very slightly magnetic (maybe pieces of ferrite?). It didn’t fix the player.
My first guess would be a tantalum capacitor that popped its electrolytic innards. (They can have quite violent failure modes, i.e. they may explode and/or ignite. Scroll down here for another image https://www.reliabilityanalysislab.com/tl_hd_0303_tantalumCaps.asp)
The bevelled corners aren’t quite right though, and there seems to be this little screwhead “X” inside, like in these trimmer capacitors. allproduct.com - The World's Best Products Directory for Volume Buyers - I’ve no idea what kind of special materials are inside those (if any) or how they would behave if they short out.
An accumulation of particles from wear on the video head?
Good thought, but it was a VD player, not a VCR.
Definitely a cap (or at least it once was) if the C73A board designator is for that and not the nearby electrolytic. Given its proximity to the crystal, it’s probably part of the clock oscillator for one of the logic chips; perhaps a master clock flor all the logic. For 27.0 MHz try replacing it with a 5-10 pF tant, although even a ceramic should do. If you have, or have access to, a scope you can see if you have oscillation on the ungrounded side of the cap.
Thanks, but it’s not worth fixing - I might do it for amusement someday, but since new ones are $30, I’ll just go by one as a present. I’m just curious as to where all the whiskers came from. After all, it was inside a sealed case.
I sell capacitors for a living (yes, really) and that doesn’t look like any cap I’ve ever seen. I’d guess the C73A refers to the aluminum elect. cap above it. Got any pictures from after the fuzz was removed? Have you got a make and model for the DVD player? We can probably find a board layout online some place.
After I blew the whiskers away, it’s apparent that it’s a ceramic trimmer capacitor. The cap above it is C40.
Yay, I was right. 
Still the question remains - what on earth could happen to a trimmer capacitor to make it look like this?
Can you see if it’s charred beneath the fuzz? If the part hasn’t smoked up from the inside, we know it must have been a slow process or an accumulation from outside.
Presumably, any component that is sealed against dust and whose contents may ‘bubble up’ in case of thermal failure may be able to build up pressure and go pop like a corn kernel. But there doesn’t seem to be any ‘poppable’ stuff in these thingies. Here’s a page with an internal diagram of one. http://www.spraguegoodman.com/305/305gkg26x.html (click http://www.spraguegoodman.com/305/305img/305gs.jpg for larger view)
Notice that the screw part on top of this particular model is made from phosphor bronze with a hot-dipped tin plating. So, tin whiskers, after all? Some kind of rust buildup and/or bloom-out from the tin coating?
It looks like a Mandelbrot set. 
The photo made me think of The Andromeda Strain.
Let’s just hope that isn’t it.
In my first post, I somehow had the impression that it was that way by design. Now that I realize that it isn’t, it looks more like the “fuzz” is tracing field lines of some sort. Metal would make me think magnetic field, but the fact that it apparently “grew” out of a capacitor makes electric field seem more likely. Something would have to go pretty bad on a capacitor for it to have an external field that strong, though.