Recheck periodically for better quality videos

[ankenyr]

This being an archiving project, downloading the best quality desired by the Format Scheme is presumably desired. If a user wants 4k but only 2k is available, 2k is what will be downloaded.

Sometimes however the 4k transcode can be delayed and not available for some time. In certain cases it is possible for this to take even weeks

It would be good to emulate what TheFrenchGhosty is doing where you immediately download what ever the best quality is right as soon as it is available. Then periodically check for higher quality videos to be available. This periodic check only happens for videos that are younger than the cut-off period in order to not waste time checking videos that are too old. This period should be configurable by the user.

[bbilly1]

Thanks for reaching out on Discord and thanks for adding the links here. We already have the periodic rescan task, I think we can add this there.

But first step would be to index the file metadata into Elasticsearch so that can be compared on the next scan.

[ankenyr]

Something that will be difficult is how to determine if something is more desired based on the format selection string. From my understanding the selection language can be quite complex but at least for FrenchGhost's there is a list of items separated by /

Will write up a few edge cases with my suggestion in a tl;dr on how I think the feature should work below

Lets say you have an video stored and its metadata. You have your format select string and a new video is downloaded. You can try and compare the videos but that isn't always straight forward. I may prefer H265 over VP9. So straight media to media comparisons isn't the best.

You could just take what ever the new thing is if it is different but what happens if the content creator removed a 4k video for some reason. You have 4k and now a 2k is downloaded. Or similarly with codecs.

You could try and parse the selection format string but that is fraught with issues itself. What happens if the format is changed? How complex is it really? I suspect you can do a lot of crazy stuff with it.

My suggestion would be to allow someone to make multiple selections. For me I would break up FrenchGhosts script into the 102 different individual selections such as
bestvideo[vcodec^=av01][height>=4320][fps>30
bestvideo[vcodec^=vp9.2][height>=4320][fps>30]
bestvideo[vcodec^=vp9][height>=4320][fps>30]
being the first three selections. These would be in their priority. TA would perform a request for each one in order till one is successful and then store which index (SI) was successful. Subsequent runs would only attempt index 0 to SI-1. If a new video is found it updates SI and the media.

We should also reach out to the dev of yt-dlp, they are super responsive and may have an even better idea that I am not thinking of on this.

[bbilly1]

@ankenyr are you still interested in working on this? v0.3.6 now indexes all required metadata, first required step towards checking if there is a better resolution out there.

[Emporea]

Something thats related to this and I'd like to see is the possibility to redownload a set of videos, e.g. playlist, for a channel, or all videos in a given new quality.

Lets say I have downloades everything using bestvideo 1080 and i would like to download every video in 720.