DARREN COPE

Are you trying to get the “Train” view of Golden Cheetah set up so you can suffer all winter, but the Video Player is not working? Well yesterday I decided to set up Train View, and experienced exactly this problem.

I opened up Golden Cheetah on a new Windows 8 laptop (that I have yet to run Train view on), and noticed that the default Train View setup doesn’t include the Video Player ’tile.’ I easily added the Video Player to the layout by going to the View Menu > Add Chart > Video Player.

Add Video Player to Train View

I then started a workout, and although the sensors were all properly detected, recording, and the .erg file was working properly and showing target wattage, the video was not playing. The “Video Player” tile was just a black box. Weird!

I did a search of the Golden Cheetah website, and the user group, and didn’t find much info. However, one post in the user group mentioned trying to open the video in VLC Media Player to see if the video works. I normally have VLC installed, but apparently I had yet to install it on this new laptop.  It turns out that VLC is required for Golden Cheetah to play videos. I installed it, and right away everything worked perfectly!

Train View with working video!

Note that I used the very useful Sufferfest ERG Spreadsheet to create an .erg file for the video — it works with all of the Sufferfest videos, and makes them much more useful! The spreadsheet allows you to correlate what’s happening in the video with target power zones based on your personal FTP.  That’s what is driving the “Target Power’ and blue graph you see above. Also, if you have a CompuTrainer or Wahoo Kickr, Golden Cheetah will control the resistance based on this file as well. Sadly, my workout was terrible. I couldn’t reach any of the target power zones (despite setting my FTP to a ‘lower’ estimate than it should be) and my heart rate was sky high the entire time. Bizarre, but an issue for another day!