Yes, they do show up on ebay, but usually not in working condition. Then you have to find someone that can do a restoration. Keep in mind that there may only be one chance to play the tape before it falls apart, so the player needs to be working perfectly.
That tape is old and degrading. If it's not digitized soon, it will be lost.
The Ampex 1" type C video tape recorder needed is rare, but it's not impossible to find one. The NSA could certainly watch the video if they wanted to. The just don't want to go through the effort for a FOIA request.
There is no way to prove that every copy of the stolen data was actually destroyed. I bet the data will show up for sale at some point.
Well, you found your problem then. You will need to get a decent quality SSD to speed it up. Avoid those cheap QLC SSDs, they are slower than mechanical hard drives once the SLC cache fills up.
All of that AI crap they keep pushing certainly doesn't help the energy consumption though.
I am absolutely not defending them. The cop should have acted professionally and ignored what this guy said. Unfortunately, this is what tends to happen in the US. The cops here can usually get away with anything including murder with nothing more than some paid suspension as a punishment.
They are called computer monitors. There are also commercial sign displays, but the picture quality is usually not very good.
Straight keys are bad enough, imagine how bad of a repetitive strain injury you would get from this.
Transcoding from one lossy codec to another just reduces the quality even more. You can transcode to wave or flac, but that will just increase the file size.
There won't be much of a quality difference between opus and mp4. If the music was uploaded at 44.1K, the mp4 will be higher quality even though the bitrate is slightly lower since the opus would be resampled to 48K.
I picked this little scope up from the Seapac swap meet a week and a half ago for $3. It turns out that all it needed was some contact cleaner to get it working again.
This is a portable scope that can run from 12V DC as well as an internal battery. I don't have the battery for it, but I could probably put some 18650's in there if I disable the built in charger.
Digitizing is the easy part. Even though it's an ancient format, it's still just NTSC composite video and analog audio. You digitize it just like you would a VHS tape.