Show HN: I made a tool to turn boring GPX files into cool videos | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a tool to turn boring GPX files into cool videos

avomap.com

24 pointszitscher16 comments

Hey, I'm Tobi. After burning out some time ago, I took a long motorbike trip to recover. I recorded my trip with a GPS tracker but didn't know what to do with the data. So, I created a tool to visualize the route.

Feedback I’d have like more examples to watch at the top of tha page and less “create your video” buttons. All the buttons feel desperate.

Great feedback, much appreciated!

Prior art here would be relive.cc which pretty much built their whole business on this concept applied to the cycling market

Current I publish 2 walking videos per week on YouTube [1] also with a GPX Animation in the intro. For the GPX track I currently use the free GPX Animator [1] with some scripting of the CLI args.

I have experimented also with Mapbox and Remotion and could get nicer results than GPX Animator but it's not even worth the render time. Same for Google Earth Studio - it's just too slow as I often create batches of 5-6 videos per day. How long does one 20s video take to render - 4K60?

One thing I'd love to have is not just the GPX track but photos or video snippets popping up geo-located - maybe even info boxes for more than just a moving line. This could be coming from Wikipedia etc or some custom JSON data. There is potential to improve map animations but I can't see how I would recoup the cost per video. For me it would be worth less than $0.50 per video on my volume of 100+ videos per year. The web interface and video looks nice though the pricing is out of reach.

I wish you success and maybe there really is a market for premium priced GPX Animations. For me personally this could only work as a standalone app in the $30-$50 price range only.

Good job on the polishing!

[1]https://www.youtube.com/@poptravelorg [2]https://gpx-animator.app/

I like the idea of the snippets popping out along the way. I would clearly use it for my website (https://trekstories.c100k.eu).

Another good use case I see, is for race organizers to showcase the route on their website. That would look more modern compared to the usual low-res screenshot. Something like this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5GjuRS9sVA

Thanks! Yeah, that's exactly my target audience for now. Next up: Travel Vloggers (maybe) and tour organizers.

Fantastic feedback, thanks! Yeah, I am still figuring things out and your response gives me some perspective of how the videos might be used as well.

Regarding rendering time: 20s at 4k60 takes around 6 minutes. There is, highly likely, a way to make this more performant but it's not on the priority list at this moment.

As user pmdfgy mentioned, outdoor events is exactly the market I am focusing right now: Marathons, bike or trails races. Most of them have a simple map of their race, if at all, and when it comes to more extreme races like running or cycling in the mountains I'd like to see a preview of what I am getting into as a participant.

One of my first users, the Vietnam Mountain Trail Series, uses it to visualize their races like the Vietnam Mountain Marathon. They've put it on their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5GMPNfEDbU

Nice job ! I've tried with a hiking GPX. It works pretty well and the sliders to adjust the settings are great. However, I'm seeing weird vertical lines on the map.

Thanks! Can you elaborate on weird vertical lines? Do they look like small spikes?

Yes, going from the ground to the sky. Maybe because it was on a volcanic island ? There were some in the Ocean as well.

Ugh, yeah, that's a bug with Mapbox itself. I need to update to their latest version but it comes with some downgrades for me. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. It happens rarely but it happens -- and I need to fix it. Will focus on this soon.

In full HD description there is a typo: change 30 to 60 fps as it is shown in points under.

Ah! Good eye! Thanks for pointing that out.

Is there an opensource version similar to this to selfhost ??

Not at this moment. The whole thing is build on top of Mapbox though. Give them a try!

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