make a --really-best-format option

[philcerf]

Checklist

• I'm reporting a feature request
• I've verified that I'm running yt-dlp version 2022.01.21. (update instructions)
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones. DO NOT post duplicates
• I've read the guidelines for opening an issue

Description

The format sorting is documented to have the default:

lang,quality,res,fps,hdr:12,codec:vp9.2,size,br,asr,proto,ext,hasaud,source,id

mentioning that hdr:12 and odec:vp9.2 is set because better ones aren't supported by many devices yet.

That seems rather unfortunate, because people expect that per default they get the "best", while in fact they may not in some cases.

Of course one could just override that with:

--format-sort 'lang,quality,res,fps,hdr,codec,size,br,asr,proto,ext,hasaud,source,id'

which has however the drawback, that it also overrides any extractor specific sort order (which is usually there for a good reason).

So it would be nice to either have something like a --really-best-format option or alternatively, really use the best per default (and perhaps provide a compatibility option that allow people to select formats for older devices.

Cheers.

[chrizilla]

related: #2260

[Ashish0804]

or better way is to make best really the best by using av1 and add a --i-use-dlp-on-a-toaster-even-in-2020s option.

[pukkandan]

#2260 will satisfy this use case and more. There is no need for yet another option

[philcerf]

@pukkandan But doesn't this again mean that one needs to manually override (and worse, have knowledge about why some extractors override the default and whether this should be actually kept)?

What @Ashish0804 proposes would have been my other choice... I guess it's probably just bad, that the default is not really the best.

[philcerf]

I went back through git history and it seems at least the restriction to prefer vp9 over av01 dates originally back to 9f88814 which is nearly a year old.
Doesn't most playback software (at least in the Linux world) support AV01 now?

HDR restriction was added with 176f186

[pukkandan]

#458 (comment)

The HDR restriction makes sense to use permanently. While DV is technically better than the other formats, it is terrible if your display does not support it. So I want users to specifically ask for it if they want to prioritize it

[Jules-A]

@philcerf Even if most people could play AV1, Youtube (practically the only site that's serving it) aim for AV1 to have the same quality as the VP9 encode with the advantage only being the file size savings from using a lower bitrate which is more useful for streaming than downloading with YT-DLP.

[0xallie]

#458 (comment)

The HDR restriction makes sense to use permanently. While DV is technically better than the other formats, it is terrible if your display does not support it. So I want users to specifically ask for it if they want to prioritize it

Yeah, DV is a proprietary format. But dual-layer HDR10+DV streams (DV profile 8) should probably be prioritized over HDR10-only.

[chrizilla]

with the advantage only being the file size savings from using a lower bitrate which is more useful for streaming than downloading with YT-DLP.

Same quality for half (or considerable reduction of) the file size is useful for both streaming and downloading. One could argue that filesize is even more important for downloading given that you have to store the downloaded video on a limited storage space.