[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] add colours to warnings and errors

[Rodney Baker]

May I provide some feedback on this from the point of view of a user who uses 
ffmpeg in a number of scripts for automating conversion processes?

On Fri, 23 Apr 2010 04:19:31 Michael Niedermayer wrote:
>[...]
> > 
> > Did you ask them?  FFmpeg currently prints:
> > 
> > 1.  FFmpeg version and copyright.  This is impossible to silence.
> > 2.  Build date and compiler version.  Impossible to silence.
> > 3.  configure options used.  Impossible to silence.
> > 4.  Version of all libs, twice.  Impossible to silence.
> 
> these are there because we need them in bugreports, i dont mind at all
> to disable them by default if it works out in the sense that people
> will enable them for bugreports.
> That is iam perfectly fine with trying such change for a while and
> seeing if that works or not
> 

I agree. Most of the time (when things work write) this information falls into 
the "don't care" category. A clearly documented option to enable these for bug 
reports is necessary, but otherwise they should be silenced.

> > 5.  Input/output stream dump.
> > 6.  Frame counter.
> > 
> > This usually amounts to 20-30 lines of useless information (most of
> > the time it's just repeating what's already on the command line).  A
> > one-line error message is easily lost in that jungle.
> > 
> > IMO the default output should be cut down to substantially as most of
> > that is only useful for debugging problems.  We'd obviously insist on
> > running with -v 1 (or something) for bug reports.
> 
> i disagree, the stream dump is usefull and giving the user some feedback
> about what is done is usefull too. The user might that way spot a problem
> sooner (like ohh shit wheres the audio stream its not listed ...)
> 
> [...]

Again, I agree. The I/O stream dump and frame counter should be shown by 
default, but perhaps an option to silence them (and/or dump them to a user-
specified log file) would be useful.


-- 
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Rodney Baker VK5ZTV
rodney.baker at iinet.net.au
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