Overwriting lower quality files

[MacFH - C E Macfarlane - News]

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.