Semme,
Well, no, it's not that magical; it just works for ffmpeg because ffmpeg will tell you how it was compiled.
Actually, all you need is
The rest of it just extracts the information that was of interest to me.
ffmpeg prints the version information on the stderr stream, not the stdout stream.
2>&1 simply redirects the stderr stream to the stdout stream so that it can be piped to grep.
By the way, I had been confused about why wingevil had problems with streaming from a URL even though he had installed streamripper (which is supposed to handle the connection to the radio server), but I now see the problem. Yes, streamripper does handle the connection to the radio server, but the connection from streamripper to ffmpeg uses a URL:
http://localhost:8002.
I had been under the mistaken belief that if streamripper was installed, a recent version of pmusic would work with a version of ffmpeg compiled with the
--disable-network option. But with that option, ffmpeg will not recognize even that local URL.