ffmpeg shell script help

[HaydnH]

Hi All,

I know this isn't really the correct forum to post this to, but I can't seem to find any active ffmpeg forums... and at least I'm a fedora user

I'm currently writing a shell script that converts video files to mp4 with h264 encoding for use with a media player. The script runs the following command:

ffmpeg -y -i "$FILE" -f mp4 -vcodec h264 "$FILENAME.mpg" 2>> $LOGFILE

However, I need a way of checking if the conversion has been successful. Annoyingly ALL output from ffmpeg goes to stderr (cheers devs!) so I can't just check if stderr contains anything, there's no "successful" string on completion and I don't really want to test for every possible error message. Any ideas?

BTW, I don't mind using a different conversion tool as long as it supports mp4/h264 and doesn't require too many libraries.

Haydn.

[.:neogeo:.]

hey,

Just a couple of ideas that might help you with your script. You could...

1. test the bash $? after you execute ffmpeg -y -i "$FILE" -f mp4 -vcodec h264 "$FILENAME.mpg" 2>> $LOGFILE for its return status. when $? = 0 then success or $? = 1 failure

2. or maybe test if the output file exists on the filesystem and/or if the file exists test if the file size is greater than 0 bytes

Hope that helps

[HaydnH]

It's a ksh script but $? still works in ksh. Hopefully ffmpeg returns proper return codes, if not the file size idea is a good one!

Thanks,

Haydn.