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Silent video clips exposed a flawed file-existence check in a video merge tool

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A developer discovered a bug in their browser-based video merge tool after a user reported a crash at the final output stage. The root cause was a normalisation step that mistakenly treated a file's existence as proof it contained an audio stream, when ffmpeg silently succeeds even without encoding audio. Because ffmpeg.wasm resolves its promise regardless of whether a command truly succeeded, the silence-track fallback never triggered for audio-free clips. This left the transition filter graph referencing a non-existent audio stream, causing the merge to fail with a misleading error about the output file. The fix was a dedicated audio-probe function that explicitly checks for an audio stream before choosing the encode command, rather than inferring stream presence from file existence alone.

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Silent video clips exposed a flawed file-existence check in a video merge tool · ShortSingh