local wildlife

Beavers are usually quite wary of me down at Bluffer’s Park, but I was about three metres away from this one and I didn’t seem to be interrupting.

The original video is nearly half a gigabyte. I don’t really want to use YouTube, so you’re getting it at 360p, courtesy of ffmpeg and lots of swearing.

I don’t want to turn this post into a rant about ffmpeg and its very special options, so here, for posterity, are the command lines I used to generate this from a Pixel 8 phone video:

ffmpeg -i PXL_20250807_103015312.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 32 -pass 1 -an -f null /dev/null
ffmpeg -i PXL_20250807_103015312.mp4 -c:v libvpx-vp9 -b:v 0 -crf 42 -pass 2 -r 30 -vf "scale=trunc(iw/6)*2:trunc(ih/6)*2" -c:a libopus -filter:a "volume=1.5" browsing_beaver-smaller.webm