Cleaner ffmpeg terminal output

Question

I am running ffmpeg on headless servers with the intention of keeping these processes running for hours on end. I would like to parse the output for useful information like "fps", "time" "bitrate" or any warnings/errors and pass them to other processes, ie a web server.

By default ffmpeg prints to the terminal with this information every second on a new line. This makes parsing it very cumbersome and eventually degrades in performance the longer the terminal output becomes.

• Is parsing the terminal output the right strategy here and is there a flag for something like bash's "echo -a" append function within ffmpeg? I've set a few of the -v flags to change the output but none match my needs!

• Is there a way I can directly invoke something like "getFps()" on the running ffmpeg process itself to return the current encoding rate?

Thanks