Roy's Place

I got out my HD camcorder last week and attempted to shoot some better video of the Hummers at the same time as I was shooting some still photos.  I had some limited success and learned a little in the process.  This video footage is an example of the intensity of the territorial fighting that even the females do when it comes to a food source.  But there reaches a point when a little exhaustion and hunger forces a truce.  Even if it’s only for a few moments.

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I’ve recently converted this web site to the WordPress application and as I work with it I add plug-ins.  The latest plug-in is the Flash Player.  This a test of the player plug-in with a piece of video footage of my Ruby Throated Hummingbirds.  The documentation for the plug-in wasn’t clear on which codex of MP4 it supports and so I’ve had to create some test files of the various codex and see which one works.  I found that “H264″ was the only codex that I use that worked.

As for the video itself, I’ve had a hummingbird feeder out all summer but no visitors until August.  Apparently after the females have raised their young they start roaming for better resources. First I had one and then a couple weeks later another female showed up and the battles began.  Now I have three females and occasionally one male shows up to feed.  The three females are constantly battling over the feeder and so yesterday I bought a second feeder and put it around the corner of the house, out of sight of the first feeder so that the alpha female couldn’t see and attempt to control both of the feeders.

We’ve been having rain for the last 3 or 4 days and yesterday afternoon the sun finally came out and so I set up the camera to try and get some better video of the hummingbirds. Specially the male, which doesn’t show up very often.  Finally got some good video of the alpha female and a very short piece with the male.

I take the video from the camera, it comes out in the motion jpeg or mjpeg format and convert it to an avi file and then run it through the Handbrake software to convert it to mp4 H.264 format.  Sometimes Handbrake doesn’t like the avi file that I create from the mjpeg file and I have do it over.  Not sure what Handbrake’s problem is.  I think I’m using a down level version, so the next step is to get Handbrake current.

The good news is that web sites like Facebook and Vimeo will take the mjpeg format directly.  So to upload to them just requires creating the avi file.

Just to see the difference, I’ve embedded a link to a Facebook version of the same video

And a link to my Vimeo.com version.

Well actually, it looks like the Vimeo video is the best quality.  It may be a result of Vimeo converting directly from the large avi file and the WordPress Flash plug-in is working from the re-coded mp4 file.  Anyway this was a good first test of my options for streaming video from my site.