Overwriting lower quality files

[MacFH - C E Macfarlane - News]

On 01/10/2023 21:31, MrBrunes wrote:
>
> 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.

It depends very much on the type of SD.  Some more recent encodings are 
using XSD as opposed to SD, and they're awful  -  in wildlife programmes 
rivers flow stop-start, etc  -  but the older SD encodings to which I 
was referring were fine.  It also seems to depend on who does the 
encoding, some occasional individual programmes were done really badly, 
and for them any re-encoding, even just again as SD, is likely to be an 
improvement, and that's probably what you're seeing with HD or FHD.

> 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.

I suspect the 96kps is probably a one-off error.  For some time now, the 
BBC have been using 128kbps for everything (except possibly xsd, as I 
never download those I wouldn't know).  ISTR that there was a time in 
the past when they tried higher audio bitrates for HD, but people 
complained that their equipment couldn't play them back, so they lowered 
them back to 128.