I make a habit of carryong a small GPS receiver with me on trips. Recently, I have been able to embed these GPS tracks into Google Earth and represent the trip as as a video with a small marker showing the path. Below is an example, showing the first day of a two-day trip to Texas, that ended in Memphis. Note that when the arrow stops and jiggles around, it usually marks a place where I stopped
The key to doing this is to first download GPSBabel which converts between various GPS data files. A GPX file is the most common format, but my GPS receiver produces .CSV files. GPSBabel will convert either one of these to Google Earth KML files, using a graphical interface. The alternative command line for this would look something like this:
gpsbabel -t -i v900 -f [.CSV file] -o kml,floating=1,track=1 -F [KML file]
where you would substitute in the appropriate file names within the square brackets.
I zip the KML file to KMZ to reduce the file size using:
zip [KML file] [KMZ file]
When this KML or KMZ file file is displayed in Google Earth, look at the side bar and you will see “waypoints” and “trackpoint” subfolders. Un-check the “waypoints” folder. Look inside the “trackpoints” folder and you will see an arrow icon and another folder icon. Un-check this folder icon. That folder contains all the text labeling the track points and that will just slow down Google Earth.
Now look at the upper left-hand corner of the Google Earth display area. There are two movable icons on the slide bar (a concave icon and a house-shaped icon). Move the icon on the left (concave) to the far left. Then move the larger icon (house-shaped) near it on the left. Above the slide bar, there are some more small icons. The one that looks like a small clock with a right-pointing arrow will start the trip arrow icon moving on the track. The wrench to right and above the slide bar will allow you to control the things like the speed of the playback.
I could not figure out a direct way to save this a video file from Google Earth. I then used QuickTime (on a Mac) to save a screen video in a MOV file. This is usually a large file. Use the free program Handbrake to convert this to a MP4 file. Change the number of pixels to match a conventional format (e.g., 1920 x 1080 for HD). This will generally reduce the file size.
Road Trip Adventures 