> 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.