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

[Måns Rullgård]

Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> writes:

> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 01:25:33PM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
>> James Darnley <james.darnley at gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>> > If your terminal isn't then you need to fix it.  This is looking
>> > more and more like a Windows only feature.
>> 
>> We don't do windows-only features.  They rot too quickly.
>
> what rots is poorly maintained features. if someone promisses to maintain
> this there is no reason not to consider it

History shows that windows-only features tend to rot.

>> The real problem here is that the ffmpeg output is much too verbose by
>> default.  Any error messages are easily masked by useless chatter.
>> The usual Unix way is to print _nothing_ on success.  Then anything
>> printed is an error or a warning.
>
> the log level is configureable.

Yes, I know -v -1 will shut up most of the messages, but 1) they are
printed by default, and 2) there's a still an awful lot being spewed
out.

> And the defaults should be what most people prefer, "the unix way"
> is rarely what most people prefer.

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.
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.

-- 
M?ns Rullg?rd
mans at mansr.com