"Digital microchip, good for thousands of hours of recording"

No reception on older TV sets resulted in static. That's what most people would be familiar with in 1997.


----
I've got better things to do tonight than die

-Springer TF:The Movie

I thought exactly the same thing...."digital microchip" is redundant and meaningless, there is no sensible explanation. This has to be excused "because movie", i.e. it's a plot device to show that 18 hours passed. This is the kind of issue that script advisers should have picked up on and posited a better way of phrasing it. There's a few instances like this in the movie, as there are in many sci-fis, very few manage to get the phraseology 100% authentic.

[deleted]

Maybe at 120x90 resolution!

There is plenty of technology that is available now but isn't mainstream because of the extremely high cost to mass produce. They clearly had an unlimited budget given the context.

Yeah, there was no solid-state memory in 1997 that could hold anywhere near "thousands of hours" of video. There weren't even any 3.5" or 5.25" hard disk drives in 1997 that could hold that much video, at least not at anything in the ballpark of standard resolution (e.g., 720 x 480, 29.97 frames per second) with MPEG-2 compression at a mediocre bitrate. Video like that would be a couple GB per hour, and if you multiply that by 2,000 (which is the minimum number of hours that constitutes "thousands"), you get about 4 TB. A "big" HDD in 1997 was only about 12 GB, which would hold about 6 hours.

MPEG-4 didn't exist until 1998, but even if they'd had that, standard resolution video would be around 400 MB per hour (at a bitrate that's on the low side of mediocre), so that's about 800 GB for 2,000 hours.

For solid-state memory in 1997, such as CompactFlash cards, 32 MB was considered "big," which could hold about 5 minutes of standard-resolution, not-yet-existent MPEG-4 video at a low/mediocre bitrate.

Newsflash: it is a movie and no alien technology was transmitted to earth in real life
Besides, military experimental technology can be 20 years ahead of anything commercial. Especially when in a pinch.

FTFY