[FFmpeg-user] "ffplay -report" creates text files with mixed line endings

[Moritz Barsnick]

Hi, Jaime,

On Tue, Nov 09, 2021 at 11:51:18 +0000, Jaime wrote:
> AV_LOG_FORCE_NOCOLOR=1 ffplay -report -rtsp_transport tcp rtsp://camera.lan
> Mailman is showing the report file as being of type: "application/octet-stream":

Is this the actual file you created, or the one you fetched from
mailman?

> A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
> Name: ffplay-20211109-100211.log
> Type: application/octet-stream
> Size: 32011 bytes
>
> I've just checked the line endings using "dos2unix -ih":
>
> $ dos2unix -ih ffplay-20211109-100211.log
>      DOS    UNIX     MAC  BOM       TXTBIN  FILE
>       17     163     301  no_bom    text    ffplay-20211109-100211.log
>
> Interesting. Is this "by design", or a bug (or neither)?

If you mean ffmpeg:

I'm pretty sure that part of this is by design. You should check the
actual line endings. ffmpeg uses a pure "CR" (carriage return, often
displayed as '^M') to cyclically overwrite the status line, and also
seems to dump this into the report file. Those would be the "MAC"
endings, I guess, and your mail agent seems to identify the file as
binary, and therefore send it as "application/octet-stream".

I cannot explain the DOS and UNIX discrepancy though. I get pure Unix:

$ dos2unix -ih ffplay-20211109-135854.log
     DOS    UNIX     MAC  BOM       TXTBIN  FILE
       0      83     327  no_bom    text    ffplay-20211109-135854.log

On the other hand, if this was not your local file, it could be
mailman's fault, or by one of the mail servers.

We would need to see your actual file to understand this. Note, I have
mailed myself such a report file, and had the local mail agent(s)
changing it! I noticed the line endings changed when receiving through
Exchange/Outlook, but I don't know who the culprit was.

Again, the "MAC" line endings will probably make the attachment binary
nevertheless(?). You should check whether you can force the MIME type
when sending, if the problem is on your sending side, and not when
receiving though mailman.

Cheers,
Moritz