Batch modify encoding of G1 albums

I never worried about encoding of albums files in g1, mainly because I haven't had any issue with that... yet.

Now that I want to migrate to G2, and ran into some encoding problems, I had a look on those photos.dat files created for each album.

Apparently older version of G1 encoded accented characters with html coding (i.e é=é etc.). At a given point (I do not know exactly when), G1 started encoding accented letters with multi-bytes encoding systems.
When I want to migrate my albums to g2, the newer ones do not cause any trouble, but the ones encoded with html coding will display the html code instead of the corresponding character. Now, I know that there is a fix for that which consist in allowing raw html display in G2, but this does not look as the good solution to me .

I want to edit all my g1 album files and replace the html code by its 16bit equivalent in the proper coding in order to get a uniform encoding on all my G1 albums. This is going to be a long and boring search-and-replace task, and I was wondering if someone by any luck would not have a ready-made script that does just that.

Thanks in advance

_guybrush_