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gpx2video

gpx2video is a Java application which generate a green screen video from a gpx file input.

Video editors which support green screen can then be used to overlay this video with footage from the same event.

At the moment this has only been tested with gpx files from Garmin Edge 305 and Forerunner 305 devices. It may not work with other gpx files (please file a ticket with a sample so I can enhance it).

The green screen merge has only been tested with iMovie on a Mac. Presumably it should work with any video editor which supports this, but I only have access to iMovie.

I use it to overlay Garmin bike ride data with GoPro video.

Detailed Instructions

Set your Garmin device to record one sample per second. While gpx2video will read gpx with sampling rates less than 1Hz, the result will not be very satisfactory (I intend to fix this later).

You'll need to be able to sync the start times of the two videos in your video editor. I recommend starting the video first, then point the camera at your GPS and hit the start button on the GPS. This will give an easy way to see exactly where the GPS data stream starts on the video.

Download gpx2video and build it with 'ant compile' (in the future I'll provide a binary to download). Then run the jar file (java -jar dist/gpx2video.jar).

Run it without any command line arguments for usage info.

You must give the option -gpx with the filename of the gpx file to read.

ffmpeg is required to generate the actual video. gpx2video assumes it is available. If ffmpeg is not installed but you have some other way of turning a sequence of images into a video, the -novideo option will generate the individual frames (1 per second) and skip the video generation. Then it is up to you to generate the video somehow.

After that, you'll need to overlay the video from gpx2video with your camera footage. I have only tested this with iMovie on a Mac but presumably other video editor will handle it as well.

Future Directions

Current version is an alpha at best. However, it does work and I am using it to generate videos of my bike rides.