FFprobe should output to stdout

[evilsoup]

At the moment, all the tools output the text information to stderr. Obviously, for ffmpeg this is necessary; but ffprobe doesn't output A/V data, only text, so this behaviour doesn't serve any purpose.

The current workaround (for regexing the output etc) is to use ffprobe input.file 2>&1. This isn't particularly onerous, but it would be nicer to have ffprobe output to stdout by default. Changing it also wouldn't break any pre-existing scripts that people are using with the current workaround, either.

[Cigaes]

AFAICS, the output of ffprobe goes to stdout. The licence boilerplate and input format dump are to stderr, but they are not meant to be parseable.

[Stefano Sabatini]

Replying to Cigaes:

AFAICS, the output of ffprobe goes to stdout. The licence boilerplate and input format dump are to stderr, but they are not meant to be parseable.

Closing as WONTFIX, for the exact reason explained above (parsing output which is not meant to be parseable defeats the whole design purpose of ffprobe).

[Carl Eugen Hoyos]

Do I understand correctly that this actually is not "wontfix" but "worksforme"?
(I did not test.)

[Stefano Sabatini]

Replying to cehoyos:

Do I understand correctly that this actually is not "wontfix" but "worksforme"?
(I did not test.)

It is WONTFIX, with a slight declination towards INVALID, since the proposal was to implement an anti-feature (e.g. you don't want to parse unparsable output when parsing the regular - parser friendly - output which goes to stdout), and yes it would break all the scripts which parse the current output.

Note that the title of the ticket is misleading, since ffprobe output currently *goes* to stdout, but for the configuration/version blurb which goes to stderr (and is not meant to be parsable).