I'm in a somewhat similar old-media-conversion quandary.
I've got a dozen MiniDV tapes - anyone remember that technology? - early 2000s? - to convert to MP4s (and/or have transferred to DVDs). Fortunately, I also have the camcorder they were taken on and it works beautifully. But to convert them yourself, you need the right Firewire cable(s) which I might have, but also an adaptor or two to get the signal into Thunderbolt ports on a Mac. Or maybe I even need a whole new Firewire-to-Thunderbolt cable as well as a converter from Thunderbolt 3 to 2 since that's what my older Mac has. Or you can do it on a Windows machine with other adaptor issues, and I think mine's way too old and slow for a process like that. The third option is simply taking them to any number of places that do it for you, but it looks like $20 or more for each tape, adding up to a nearly $300 expenditure all told.
There's no deadline on this, but I'd love to have it done in the foreseeable future, and I've also promised a friend that they can have this MiniDV camcorder for their own projects when I'm done. It's the number of obstacles in the way, and the decisions to be made, that are so frustrating with this stuff.