Tacx Apps World Map (ok mostly EU map ;) )

[BerthaVision]

https://worldmap.tacx.com/ well worth a bookmark if you are a subscriber to any of the Tacx apps, they all share the same film collection so if your using any of the mobile apps this is a good way to find easy rides until they fix the ride menu thats only displaying climbs & classics just now. The text search is quite good, it will often display the route or climb your looking for by the time you hit 3 keys. You can zoom in & out also to display a rough route of each individual ride. Click any of the icons & you get the ride info!



Always on the lookout for route ideas,

[Malfukt]

Always on the lookout for route ideas,

Suggestions for rides you say, Hmmm....well to help get a around GDPR you could consider : Continental Shelf or Abyssal Plain, due to the low visibility all that blurring during editing would be a thing of the past... obviously a rubber cycling suit would be required and a bottle or two of oxygen

[BerthaVision]

here is what you can see if you zoom in on Gascony & the eastern Pyrenees (btw Gascony is loaded with rolling hills type rides)

[nzuraw]

I use to load in all the GPX routes into Google Earth, but this is better. It's good to see a 'world' view of the rides and drill down to see the routes winding through the countryside. In TDA - the map is too small and fiddly I find.

BTW the only Australian route shown isn't far from my house :p Pop over for coffee once you're done

[BerthaVision]

Mal you’re right, I did ask for routes lol I’ve marked your suggestion on the very same list that I will add those Tacx ask for

[Ian Oliver]

"Always on the lookout for route ideas,"

First, thank you for the many years of great films. I really cannot fully express how much I appreciate them and how beneficial they are for getting through long winters and coming out the other end with some semblance of conditioning.

Personally my top desire is more stuff in The Netherlands. What is it like doing training rides in the safest country in the world to ride bicycles (they are the only country where riding a bicycle is safer than being in a car. A bicycle rider in the UK is 3 times as likely to be killed per mile ridden as in Netherlands, ...). How are their roadways & bikeways designed? If you mention building a Dutch style bikeway here (U.S.) all of the 'serious' riders say that then you can't train - yet The Netherlands, with a country full of such bikeways, produces great teams and great riders.

Next for me are rides going through various villages and city tours, either as a tour or race stages.

[BerthaVision]

"Always on the lookout for route ideas,"

First, thank you for the many years of great films. I really cannot fully express how much I appreciate them and how beneficial they are for getting through long winters and coming out the other end with some semblance of conditioning.

Personally my top desire is more stuff in The Netherlands. What is it like doing training rides in the safest country in the world to ride bicycles (they are the only country where riding a bicycle is safer than being in a car. A bicycle rider in the UK is 3 times as likely to be killed per mile ridden as in Netherlands, ...). How are their roadways & bikeways designed? If you mention building a Dutch style bikeway here (U.S.) all of the 'serious' riders say that then you can't train - yet The Netherlands, with a country full of such bikeways, produces great teams and great riders.

Next for me are rides going through various villages and city tours, either as a tour or race stages.

If we do anymore filming we will have more rides in the Netherlands, remember to use the country filter we have a few rides there already including one that starts very close to the tacx factory along the coast. Will probably film a new Amstel Gold style route there next. Also we have some good bike path films in Belgium check out the Schelde & Gent City Trip.

[mcorn]

I see there about 5 in the Netherlands, but it looks like the overall ride count is at least 200.

[Ian Oliver]

That's quite encouraging. Amstel was one of my favorite TTS3 rides (as well as Flanders 2007).

Yeah, I've downloaded all of the NL rides currently available as well as all of the various city rides and numerous others including Ghent (I'm downloading Schelde now - thx). All great stuff. When we get in to our new house in May I'll have a 52" 4k curved display for TACX to look forward to (It's currently in our family room - deal w/ AV company is that they supply all new TV's in new house and we get a nice discount so our current TV's get repurposed).

[BerthaVision]

That's quite encouraging. Amstel was one of my favorite TTS3 rides (as well as Flanders 2007).

Yeah, I've downloaded all of the NL rides currently available as well as all of the various city rides and numerous others including Ghent (I'm downloading Schelde now - thx). All great stuff. When we get in to our new house in May I'll have a 52" 4k curved display for TACX to look forward to (It's currently in our family room - deal w/ AV company is that they supply all new TV's in new house and we get a nice discount so our current TV's get repurposed).

Hopefully they will make public the 4K content its most of the rides now, we have always had it since the start for testing

[mcorn]

Hopefully they will make public the 4K content its most of the rides now, we have always had it since the start for testing

The 4K stuff is great and beautiful. It is mostly a cost issue as a 4K file is 2 to 4 times bigger than 1080P. So, from a business standpoint, the question would be whether customers would be willing to pay the extra download costs. I guess one way Tacx could structure the subscription program is to sell it by the gigabyte per month and let customers decide how they want to use their allotment each month.

[nzuraw]

The 4K RLVs are superb on the big screen. It makes me want to buy a hi-def projector or 100" television so its lifesize.

[Malfukt]

I guess one way Tacx could structure the subscription program is to sell it by the gigabyte per month and let customers decide how they want to use their allotment each month.

I like that idea...

[BerthaVision]

I guess one way Tacx could structure the subscription program is to sell it by the gigabyte per month and let customers decide how they want to use their allotment each month.

I like that idea...

This was how I wanted it priced at the start, Tacx even started the original design of the platform with a slider bar for available data that you would then top up more or less spot on ike many phone service providers do with their 4G packages. That would have changed the pricing model to quality, we would make more by offering higher quality high bitrate films. I knew a company like Tacx would eventually eat away at the bitrate as a kind of piggy bank of cash until the customerbase finally gave up with it. Just now this is the case, our Full HD is lower quality (bitrate compression wise) then 720p in TTS4. Camera gear improved the quality but we have been on the same gear for the last 4 years...hence the older films in TDA at the very bottom of the menu are often better then the new ones...our gear was new back then, brand new lens Bertha was smooth running...now everything is worn out....including me haha

For me 4K is seperate, it should be priced so that it still makes a profit even if all the rides were downloaded, but the customer should pay for a high quality bitrate

[Ian Oliver]

I wonder if it'd be a lot easier from a programming standpoint to just have a fixed charge per download for 4k? Something like $5 maybe? I don't know that I'd want to pay for a higher per month subscription tier as the HD tier is pretty much all I can swallow. But I'd be willing to pay a few extra bucks when I download to get 4k quality.

Interesting about the equip age. We often do stills and vid at the same time for fashion shoots (I do stills, not vid) and I've found it interesting when I see a new Red camera on the latest and greatest gimble and then a 40 year old lens that they paid a small fortune to have mod'd to mount on the Red. That seems massively more common in the vid world than in the stills world.

Somewhat off topic but to my earlier post about more NL stuff and how NL roads are designed safer.

[BerthaVision]

Hi Ian

kind of nice to hear from someone that even knows what a Red camera is, I think the reason for using old lenses is that an image is not really about the resolution, once you have no compression artifacts thats normally enough, really resolution only matters with huge displays. What 4k tends to give is a higher bitrate & its this that the customer notices, the added clarity. These old lenses often have really cool bokha, & flare colours/shapes they can take away a lot of that harsh feeling you get with extreme detail, too much detail can be a bad thing if your trying to compress an image, often you end up having to hide or filter it away anyway, its often better to do this naturally using a older less sharp lens.

[mcorn]

Somewhat off topic but to my earlier post about more NL stuff and how NL roads are designed safer.

Thanks for providing this safety data. I think the US is a very dangerous place to ride a bike. We spent many of our biking years in Seattle, Washington, a city often awarded the best biking city in the US. When I saw this, I often wondered if they were talking about a different Seattle, which I found to be a very hazardous place to ride a bike. Of course, when you are young, you feel invulnerable and are often unaware of the risks, but with age and many thousands of miles on the road, you gain some insight from what you see and the accidents of yourself and your friends. It is not lost on me that one of the favorite discussion topics of cyclists (not just racers) are their crashes.

[BerthaVision]

Thats one thing I can be very grateful for is that I live just outside Gent with near instant access to car free tracks & river side cycleways. If you ride the Schelde to Kluisbergen ride or Gent City Trip these both start in my little village. There is a Schelde Valley running film that I passed along today on my MTB I think I see two cars in the 90minutes I was out (ok the virus has reduced that somewhat haha).