How to force ffmpeg into non-interactive mode?

Question

Sometimes you want ffmpeg to ask you whether it should overwrite a file. Sometimes it's just a script that you prefer would fail if something is amiss. I.e. don't rely on stdin to answer if you have a question.

Solution

See https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html#Main-options

-stdin - Enable interaction on standard input. On by default unless a pipe is detected.

-nostdin - To explicitly disable console interactions. Without -y this will cause ffmpeg to error out if the target file exists.

-y - To overwrite the output file

Comments

[ubershmekel]

That's if you want it to always overwrite. If you'd rather it error out then -nostdin is the right option.

[Velkan]

@slhck, -y is not enough. FFmpeg is still eating some characters which is causing weird bugs in the shell scripts.

[GlynD]

You appear to need -nostdin -y In order to overwrite

[Freedo]

running this inside a bash script and calling the script from command line, ffmpeg still outputs to terminal

[Alexis Wilke]

@Freedo if you want to redirect the output you can always use the shell redirect ffmpeg ... > output.log 2>&1 (the 2>&1 is if you want errors to also go to that log file).