Smörgåsbord

The other week I visited Tirana, Albania. In many ways it is not unlike other parts of Europe, which surprised me because its “opening up” to the rest of the world is of such such recent history (under Hoxha it was the North Korea of Europe).
One thing that certainly has changed since Hoxha’s time is city traffic. In those days there were less than 2000 cars in the whole of Albania, and look at it now:

This is a video I took from the Sky Tower on a monday at three o’clock.
Depicted are the intersections of the Bulevardi Gjergj Fishta and the Bulevardi Bajram Curri with the Rruga Dëshmorët e 4 Shkurtit. Top-right: the southwest corner of the Parku Rinia, and right across the middle of the picture the Lanë stream which is more of an open sewer, actually.

Video on this page is embedded through the HTML5 Video element, with two video streams.
I did the VP8 WebM with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i raw.avi -f webm -vcodec libvpx -acodec libvorbis -aq 3 -b 800 -y TiranaTraffic.webm

The specified bitrate seems to be ignored by the encoder. Libvpx support in ffmpeg is rather new so I guess this will be resolved in the near future.
The fallback Ogg Theora I did with ffmpeg2theora:

ffmpeg2theora -o TiranaTraffic.ogv --two-pass --optimize -V 1200 raw.avi


One Response to “Traffic in Tirana”

1. blip @November 12th, 2010 at 04:18:

   In your VP8 encoding command, you specified 800 bps instead of 800 kbps; probably that’s why it ignored your bitrate?

   Reply to this comment

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