I know my solutions to certain ad-hoc problems might seem a bit excessive. But I think I was able to defend my methods pretty well in my previous post, though I do appreciate the opportunity to learn alternate ways to approach the same real-world problems. But if you thought my methods for downloading multiple files were overkill, just wait until you see my solution for processing a long list of files just to learn — yes or no — which ones crash FFmpeg.

So we got this lengthy list of files from Picsearch that crash FFmpeg, or were known to do so circa mid-2007. Now that I have downloaded as many as are still accessible (about 4400), we need to know which files still crash or otherwise exit FFmpeg with a non-zero return code. You’ll be happy to know that I at least know enough shell scripting to pull off a naive solution for this: Continue reading →