> Does no one know what exit codes and stderr vs. stdout is anymore?

Sounds like you don't use ffmpeg very often. Because ffmpeg is able to send its output to stdout to be piped to other apps, verbose text output can't use stdout as one would expect. Non-error text is sent to stderr instead. So when you want to trap the text output you have to route stderr to text file. It takes some getting used to, but it's now normal for me.

So, yeah, I know stderr vs stdout still, but it's not what you want it to simply be. In the real world, things are not as clean as they are in school books.

Yes, this was also exactly what I have thought while reading TFA.

I worked on a code base that ran on a variety of Unixes. One customer complained about file corruption from our software. Turns out that their Unix setup was... rather unique. Spawned programs were not given a stderr file handle! If you wrote to stderr, it scribbled on whatever file was open on file handle 2.

We, uh, reasoned with the other side - we told them to fix their stupid broken setup.