mynameisthomas

[Log in to get rid of this advertisement]

Hi,

I was looking for a way to check avi files for errors and came across this tutorial. Though its ffmpeg commands work fine but I don't understand what they mean.

First Question
Now this command works but I don't understand its last option.

'-'
I understand that we give the name of the output file in the end but here we have given hyphen(-). How does it affect the ffmpeg? What does it mean? Does it tells ffmpeg there is no output file or does it tells it to dry run on the input file?

Second Question
The above command is used to redirect the output to a file.

'2>'
Why we have to put a '2' before '>'?
In other commands to redirect the output, I simply have to put a '>'; like 'ls >list', but here redirection doesn't work unless there is a 2 immediately before the '>'.
Why is to so?

Please help me with my confusion. Any explanation will be highly appreciated.

Regards

Udi

The '-' usually means that the output is dumped to the console. I assume that "-v 5" sets verbosity level high, and "-f null" means null format - so you shouldn't see any data dumped to the console, only error messages. That is how they check for errors with ffmpeg.

The "2>" redirects stderr to a file. In Linux, every program has 2 output streams: stdout and stderr. By default they are both redirected to the console - so you don't know that it's 2 different output streams... But when redirecting to files you have to be aware of it. You can also redirect stderr to stdout with "2>&1" and you can redirect both streams to a file with "&>".