Black Skimmers
May 9th, 2007 by: joshua
[flash /images/0705/skimmer_400x300.flv w=400 h=300 f={autostart=false}]
Rockport Beach Park, Rockport, Texas
This is a really cool bird that nests here in Rockport. The best part is that when they feed they “skim.” Flying close to the water and dipping their beak in as they go along picking up small fish and crustaceans. Notice that the lower beak is longer than the top. You can kind of see it in the video. I’m not happy with the video quality, but we had lots of trouble with windows (wmv) embedded video so I’m trying flash video instead. It works better but I haven’t figured out the quality setting yet.
May 9th, 2007 at 11:07 am
The video came through quite good for me. And the birds are stunning. More more!! –Peg
May 9th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I had the best results setting the quality for ffmpeg via -qscale, which effectively tells it the tolerable SNR instead of a specific bitrate (since that largely depends on the video content, and i’d rather have it buffer than look crappy). I’m currently using -qscale 10 at 640×480, fwiw.
May 10th, 2007 at 6:57 am
Uhhh, gee thanks Sage. You’ve made everything quite clear. –Mom