We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: ffmpeg

  • local wildlife

    in a bank of tangled green plants, a large dark brown beaver sits on its haunches and nibbles on greenery with its front paws to its mouth. Its fur is damp and slicked back, forming stripes as the long guard hairs curve past its tiny ears down its back. It is aware of the photographer but unbothered, even if they are only three metres away
    its wee hands …! squee!

    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.

    A beaver in Bluffer’s Park gathers an unhurried snack of tasty green fronds

    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

  • lookit them li’l doozers scoot!

    We have a lot of tiny snails in the aquarium. The loaches are supposed to eat them, but the tank was snail-free for a long time, and I suspect the loaches have forgotten that these little nodules are tasty.

    The snails don’t seem to move much; so little, in fact, that I was convinced that they just basked in the filter’s outflow, and let food come to them. To test this hypothesis, I set up a tripod, my trusty Canon PowerShot loaded with CHDK, and used an intervalometer to take an image every ten seconds for a total of a hundred images. Here’s the result, speeded up 100x:

    Plain link (MPG): snails.

    Those little dudes really do bop about, if you consider things from their timescale.

    How I made this: I renamed the jpeg files 001.jpg … 100.jpg, then ran the command:

    ffmpeg -f image2 -i %03d.jpg -r 10 -s vga -b 1200k snails.mp4