Video playback with GPS coordinates/track synchronized still remains future? Not quite:

The prototype is already 2 years old i think by now. it all started when i saw people riding mountainbikes with a camera attached to their helmet. my first impression was – who is gonna watch these videos. The stuff i have seen before, the quality was pretty miserable and the footage quite boring due to the missing context.

Being active myself with outdoor sports i thought – ok action video can be thrilling if done right but what if you could combine video with geo coordinates to make a mashup of both?! Back then there did not exists any standard for embedding geo coordinates into video meta data/stream data frame by frame or whatever, … like EXIF for DSLRs.I guess nothing has changed in these regards. I suppose the only available way is to log coordinates in NMEA form while the the video is recording. Very well possible that there may be some recorders that already do that by now – would be nice because then you need only one device instead of having a external GPS logger. But before any of this will be available for action cameras some years will pass.

So having realized that the only way to mashup the two worlds was in recording the video and log the coordinates with a very fast GPS logger the direction was very clear. To sync both worlds you basically need only a sync start point. That is because a video inside its meta data will have a timestamp on when the video has been recorded. We have its length and its frame rate. On the other hand a GPS logger will log NMEA data which also contains a timestamp for each entry like:

$GPGGA,192033.000,3710.3194,N,00334.6043,W,1,00,,0881.0,M,0.0,M,,0000*64
$GPRMC,192033.000,A,3710.3194,N,00334.6043,W,000.00,0.0,030609,,,E*41
$GPGGA,192037.000,3710.3198,N,00334.6041,W,1,00,,0882.6,M,0.0,M,,0000*6B
$GPRMC,192037.000,A,3710.3198,N,00334.6041,W,000.00,0.0,030609,,,E*4B
$GPGGA,192042.000,3710.3198,N,00334.6040,W,1,00,,0882.7,M,0.0,M,,0000*69
$GPRMC,192042.000,A,3710.3198,N,00334.6040,W,000.00,0.0,030609,,,E*48
$GPGGA,192047.000,3710.3198,N,00334.6039,W,1,00,,0882.9,M,0.0,M,,0000*6C
$GPRMC,192047.000,A,3710.3198,N,00334.6039,W,000.00,0.0,030609,,,E*43
$GPGGA,192052.000,3710.3198,N,00334.6038,W,1,00,,0883.0,M,0.0,M,,0000*61

As you can see you get the time of each entry along side the lat/long an altitude. What more do you need? A video player, a google/bing satellite maps widget and Flash AS3 skills to combine the whole thing. You can see a prototype live and online under http://gvidget.com.

As i wrote on the page there would be many ways of pimping the applications but somehow i got dragged away in new directions so the widget never left its BETA state. I am thinking of remaking the whole widget and have it load videos from YouTube and loading the NMEA file from a remote location anywhere in the web. Enable up to four videos playing in sync with the gps waypoints/tracks as full screen sport app.

The real challenge of course is to make it happen also with LIVE streams!  I havent investigated lately but back then there was no viable was of doing so. I guess by now it should be possible via smartphones in one way or other. But outside any mobile internet cell, via satellite uplink stream would be awesome. I should investigate what can be done in Android – streaming video and gps data parallel should be doable fairly easy.

If you have any suggestion or are interested for a mashup let me know.