As a cyclist (and former racer), I still want to know how to capture videos with telemetry overlays (speed, power, HR, etc) from my head unit in a straightforward way. NorCal Cycling's videos - https://www.youtube.com/@NorCalCycling - are an excellent demonstration of this at work.
Yes, I've done the Garmin VIRB Edit thing, which is the very approach recommended by Jeff (NorCalCycling) in his tutorial videos on the subject. It feels like something out of 2005. It is incredibly labour-intensive and imprecise unless you're fortunate enough to be in relatively short criteriums where you've got the battery runtime to just record the whole race. Most real-world events and rides require one to turn the camera on and off at certain moments, which then requires _hours_ of stitching together clips and correlating them to GPS fixes from the head unit (in the FIT file), and quite imprecisely at that.
There has to be a more 2026 solution to this. All you need to do is correlate the footage to the FIT data points by timestamp, in the temporal domain.
If Garmin came out with one, it would absolutely annihilate this space. To the best of my knowledge, there is no competition that offers anything turn-key, though perhaps the best of my knowledge has not aged well and by now there is something. It's maddening.
Sounds like you want https://goprotelemetryextractor.com/telemetry-overlay-gps-vi... — feed it your GoPro footage, your Garmin FIT file, set up your gauges as you so desire and you’re off to the races (or the rendering at least). I suspect a lot of cycling Vloggers use it.
That’s really impressive - to anyone passing through, the video is with a watch.
Thank you! This looks like it might be the ticket.
Dunno if useful, but in RC hobby area we have had OSD (on-screen displays) for decades. Both in analog and digital video, with recording (analog OSD there's just a small chip). Although analog is probably not relevant for you -- quality is crap and you don't care about milliseconds latency as we do, so go with digital (and not HDZero, they are technically digital, but heavily invested in low-latency, for pro racers).
Just don't buy DJI -- they absolutely want lock you in to their tools, parts are often not compatible even within DJI, require to create an online account, require an app (from a custom .apk on android) and in general have questionable privacy.
Of the open-source systems there's a new OpenIPC system with a most popular implementation of RunCam WifiLink 2 that supports onboard SD card recording [1] [2].
More proprietary (but still cross-compatible with others) is Walksnail Avatar V2 [3] with 32GB of internal storage.
For your case, you don't need a VRX (receiver), although you can totally give it your your buddies to see your race (with OSD) in real time. VRX can be built-in to goggles (if the same company), or as a separate module that connects to your preferred goggles over mini-HDMI, also with recording. [4] [5]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP7Ns7H9wvI&t=49s
[2] https://shop.runcam.com/action-camera-categorie/
[3] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-hd-kit-v2
[4] https://shop.runcam.com/runcam-wifilink-rx/
[5] https://www.caddxfpv.com/products/walksnail-avatar-fpv-vrx-o...
Insta360 does this out of the box.
Does it?
No, it doesn't. Gopro actually hss gps and sensors built in, most dji cameras don't (does any?). You need extra hardware, or provide the data yourself. While in gopro you just enable it on the clip.
Of courses, for more advanced stuff you might want to provide the telemetry yourself (like the gopro doesn't know your wattage). But it does have much more than dji out of the box.
I guess I should say it has some capabilities in this area.
Been a while since I used it, but it will generate the overlays and you can sync it with your ride data (eg Strava or Apple Health in my case, but iirc it also supports Garmin Connect).
There are some capability differences between the mobile app and the Insta360 studio desktop app.
I'm pretty sure it handled multiple files, but in my case they were the chunks that the camera splits its recording into, which is a bit different than than having multiple clips as you described.
Am I wrong in thinking you could do this with ffmpeg, your video files, and your data from Strava/Garmin/whatever? This feels like a program an LLM (or human!) could write pretty easily
You would think it would be that straightforward. However, accurate synchronisation on GPS or temporal attributes would be required.
Judging by the paucity of software to do this, historically, it is not a straightforward problem, or all the devices involved don't generate all the data points required.
The real mess is when you have 26 clips from a long event to string together. It can easily take a day and a half to make a 3 minute montage out of that.
it's not as hard as you're making it seem, you just allow for a positive or negative time offset and rely on the devices counting seconds similarly, which is mostly a given now.
I did this with raw footage and a VESC speed controller dump to overlay a bunch of motor stats on a prior project, this was pre-AI and it was still only an afternoon project.
ffmpeg/image-magick do all the real heavy lifting out of the box.
This sounds like something Claude Code could do very easily. If you need to actually look at the videos that's harder but still possible, but if it's just aligning GPS times and timestamps with reasonably accurate clocks, Claude Could probably do the ffmpeg commands unsupervised. I wouldn't be surprised if Haiku (the cheapest model) could do it, or an open-source agent harness with another small 30B model.
Just prompting claude (probably I would start with Opus) "I would like a HUD display of the following metrics from my Fit file overlayed on these GoPro videos, and I'd like the videos stitched together (there are some gaps, I want seamless playback) it would probably do it in 30 minutes or less, and the majority of the time would probably be ffmpeg.
Yeah I had a little script to do something similar (no video, but merging data) just for Strava recording a while back. Had forgotten all about it until this description & 'FIT files'.
Video's a bit more complex no doubt, but like you say all the pieces are there, SMoP.
I truly hate to suggest this, but the meta vanguard nails this to a tee.
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/10/oakley-meta-vanguard-rev...
Hey, there has to be a legitimate use-case somewhere. Thank you!