GPSBabel

I like to log some of the places I go with the GPS in my phone or other devices to measure the distance I have walked and such.  Sometimes, I forget to turn it off or want to process the log files in some way to share them with someone.  http://www.gpsbabel.org/ is a really cool program to process GPS data sets so they contain only the data you want and in the format you want.

It runs on Linux, Windows and MAC.  

Here is the method I used to install gpsbabel-1.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS.

Download gpsbabel-1.4.3.tar.gz then open a terminal

cd /usr/src

mv /home/user/Downloads/gpsbabel-1.4.3.tar.gz ./

tar -xvzf gpsbabel-1.4.3.tar.gz

rm gpsbabel-1.4.3.tar.gz

cd gpsbabel-1.4.3/

./configure

make

make install

That should have been the end of it but for some reason I was getting the error:

"bash: /usr/bin/gpsbabel: No such file or directory" so I fixed that with:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/gpsbabel /usr/bin/gpsbabel

Links:

KML format

Simplify Filter

Remove Waypoints

Use the Track Filter to extract points between two times

Examples from myself, the docs and the net:

Shrink a huge track log down to 50 points, and avoid creating tons of waypoints: 

gpsbabel -t -i kml -f HUGE.kml -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -x simplify,count=50 -o kml,track=1,points=0 -F SMALL.kml

gpsbabel -t -i kml -f HUGE.kml -x nuketypes,waypoints,routes -x simplify,crosstrack,error=2m -x position,distance=1m -x track,pack,split,title="ACTIVE LOG # %Y%m%d%h" -o kml,points=0 -F SMALL.kml

Add a time value to a trackpoint, if the trackpoint contains no time value. Start at the 6 th of May, 2010 at 6 AM and increment 5 seconds between each trackpoint:
gpsbabel -i kml -f in.kml -x track,faketime=20100506060000+5 -o gtrnctr -F out.tcx


To get only the parts of a track that were mapped on 20 July 2005 between 10 AM and 6 PM, use this command line:
gpsbabel -t -i gpx -f in.gpx -x track,start=2005072010,stop=2005072018 -o gpx -F out.gpx

Changing audio codec using ffmpeg

I like to download 1080p video from http://www.lds.org/ but the audio codec they use does not work on the Samsung LN46C530F1FXZA TV I have.  Streaming is not supported natively on that model so I download the video with my PC, and then convert the audio and copy it to my USB flash drive in one step using the following ffmpeg command.

ffmpeg -threads 2 -i /home/USER/Downloads/Example-1080p-eng.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec libmp3lame -ab 160kb -ac 2 -ar 44100 /media/FlashDisk/Example-1080p-eng.mp4