> Does no one know what exit codes and stderr vs. stdout is anymore?
Sounds like you don't use ffmpeg very often. Because ffmpeg is able to send its output to stdout to be piped to other apps, verbose text output can't use stdout as one would expect. Non-error text is sent to stderr instead. So when you want to trap the text output you have to route stderr to text file. It takes some getting used to, but it's now normal for me.
So, yeah, I know stderr vs stdout still, but it's not what you want it to simply be. In the real world, things are not as clean as they are in school books.
That is exactly what I expect, or did I misread you? I expect its text output on stderr, and stdout being reserved for its video (or whatever) output.
Maybe the name “stderr” is a bit misleading. It’s totally common for non-error output to be in stderr as well, like verbose/debug logging.
I've just checked the man page for ffmpeg and they have a `-report` flag to capture the log. There should be no need to redirect stderr.