Some video cameras with gps embed the position information in the video files they generate: in addition to displaying the coordinates in video frames, they are recorded directly in the file.

mov2gpx aims to extract such information from Quicktime MOV video files.

Many dashcams produce their video as MOV files: it seems likely that cycle and bodyworn cameras may do something similar. Perhaps some drone cameras take the same approach.

Camera manufacturers usually provide their own elaborate program for viewing the video, and other functions including extracting the gps tracks. But often only a very limited number of proprietary, closed source, operating systems are supported.

On linux, there is a rich set of programs for viewing and manipulating video, so there is not much need for the proprietary programs, except for this problem: there seemed to be only one program, sggps, which could extract the gps information.

sggps worked with a Nextbase 312GW dashcam with the original firmware. But with more recent firmware, sggps failed. After failing to contact the sggps author, mov2gpx was forked from sggps.

mov2gps was developed to work on the 312GW camera, but there is good reason to expect it to work with other cameras using similar chipsets. It has been tested on video from a Street Guardian SG9665GC for which sggps was written. That video reported Novatek-96650. Other Nextbase cameras turn out to use a different variety of MOV video: version 1 of mov2gpx does not work for those. However, version 2 will cater for most of those models.

mov2gps is written in portable go, so should work on any operating system with go support. The releases subdirectory contains a few simple tar or zip archives containing the binary executables pre-compiled for several operating systems.

mov2gpx is intended to be lightweight, simple and fast; the time taken to write the gpx output will almost always be dominated by the the speed of the media, often flash. go by default produces rather large statically linked files, so the usual mov2gpx binaries are typically of the order of 2MB. The size can be reduced a little by stripping debug symbols and the like: refer to the go documentation.

Note that the source files are folded. If you modify the code, please use a proper folding editor with support for indented folds such as vim with the Kent folding extensions. The directory kent_folding contains a link to the extensions. Go folding support is planned, but a small patch is provided to add go if you download an old version.

Many folding editors are seriously deficient without proper indentation. Indentation is especially important in go source code.

Viewing the sources without proper folding support is possible, but is likely to be unpleasant and confusing. Much of the structure is embedded in the folding including indented folds.