Overwriting lower quality files

[MrBrunes]

Tx to all for the valuable insights and some useful options that I'd
not seen before.

For encoding rates I appreciate the theory with historical programmes
but I've found in practice that there are noticeably fewer blocky
video artefacts with dashfhd1 vs SD.

Comparing audio,  MediaInfo says:
hlshd1                AAC LC SBR        96kps                  48kHz
dashfhd1            AAC LC                128kbps              48kHz
i.e. there is a difference with HD encodings, and I'd assume that
given a lossy encoder then a higher bitrate is to be preferred.

Also on the older SD versions the BBC logo is on the black left
vertical border, but in dashhfd1 it's a semi-transparent BBC FOUR
ident in-screen. So it appears that it is not just a re-encode. If
there were no benefit then why would the Beeb reencode them?
With storage being relatively cheap, I've just opted to go with the
Wildean  'simplest tastes' option. 😉

With YouTube resolutions, then I've discovered that YT often thin out
videos with higher encoding bit rates. Stuff that used to be available
in HD is now only at SD! So I now grab them in HD while I can.
As for TOTP generally, I find the episodes to be entertaining
historical documents, albeit with the various redactions, with classic
renditions just not available elsewhere.

On Sat, 30 Sept 2023 at 23:17, MacFH - C E Macfarlane - News
<news at macfh.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 30/09/2023 12:05, MrBrunes wrote:
> >
> > I've just realised that some of my historical downloads of TOTP are in
> > SD or non-50fps HD but the download history doesn't seem to note the
> > quality, so I need to force download them again. Since new programmes
> > are currently made available each week (for 30d) I thought I could add
> > "force 1" to the PVR search for that programme, but then this will
> > obvs download files that are already in 50fps. Also it will keep
> > downloading files each time they are made available.
> >
> > I thought of deleting all the TOTP lines in download_history as that
> > at least would prevent them from being downloaded again subsequently,
> > but I don't know if this is an easy thing to do (can't see if my text
> > editor can do this (Notepad++).
> >
> > Is there a better, more efficient method of doing this?
>
> I've refrained from replying before because I thought you might not
> welcome my advice, which is simply: don't waste your time!
>
> Remember that ...
>
> As far as video resolution goes, TOTP2 dates from analogue days, which
> IMS at its best was roughly equivalent to the 720 x 576 of a DVD, but
> often when rebroadcast digitally was worse, for example ITV broadcast at
> 544 x 576 for a long time, and I have a series of programmes about
> Stonehenge recorded, IMS originally onto VHS, variously from UK TV and
> Ch 5 for which the resolution width is often actually less than the
> height, though whether that's down to the original broadcast or the VHS
> I can not now recall.  Currently SD downloads as 960 x 540 & HD as 1080
> x 720, so there's really little to be gained by HD over SD given the
> source material is not likely to be much if at all better than the former.
>
> Secondly, as far as the audio resolution is concerned  -  and call me
> old-fashioned if you must, but I thought the most important thing about
> music is, well, the music, not the video  -  both SD & HD have only 128k
> stereo @ 48k, so there can be no improvement there, either.
>
> However, if you insist on allowing the devil to make work for idle
> hands, I will point out that you don't need a special program to sort
> your download history, merely a spreadsheet.  Depending in which flavour
> of Office that you use, import the file as text specifying the vertical
> bar '|' as the field separator character, and perhaps also specifying
> the duration to be a numeric field and everything else as text.  That
> will enable you to sort by column within column, etc.
>