The Indoor Cyclist's support thread

jShort said:
One of the most motivating parts of indoor training is thinking that your competition is not doing it. In my head, they're all sitting on the couch eating Doritos and ice cream... Looking at the weather like "hm, maybe tomorrow".
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"No one wants to get up at 4 and run when it's pitch-dark, but it has to be done. The only reason i do it so early is because i believe the other guy isn't doing it and that gives me a little edge"
-Mike Tyson

His other famous quotes are a little more colorful.
 
gtluke said:
"No one wants to get up at 4 and run when it's pitch-dark, but it has to be done. The only reason i do it so early is because i believe the other guy isn't doing it and that gives me a little edge"
-Mike Tyson

His other famous quotes are a little more colorful.
Click to expand...
Everyone's got a plan till they get punched in the face
 
If anyone on Zwift is in the mood for a 6:05AM sufferfest tomorrow, the MGCC "hang on" ride will deliver. While there's a ride leader with a theoretical pace plan, it's really just a drop ride and there are a few legit (5+w/kg FTP) participants in the front group of about a dozen out of 175 or so riders. 2 laps of "road to ruins". I've found I can hang on with the lead group for a lap, then blow up so comprehensively I can't even latch on to groups coming up behind, or I can hang on to whatever ends up being the 2nd or 3rd group. By about 2/3 of the way through, it's all about micro-goals. "OK, just make it to 25 miles", then "get to 10 left", etc.

I like how Zwift handles the group aspect of it. You see all the other riders in the game but the nearby rider list only shows others on the ride and shows your overall position. The inset map highlights them too.

I listen in on the Discord channel. Hearing others suffer is oddly satisfying. Hearing someone casually mention his 380W FTP at 162lbs is equally demoralizing (I stalked him on Strava - races Pro/1/2 and UCI Elite cross though he does get shelled :) )
 
jShort said:
One of the most motivating parts of indoor training is thinking that your competition is not doing it. In my head, they're all sitting on the couch eating Doritos and ice cream... Looking at the weather like "hm, maybe tomorrow".
Click to expand...

Pffft. Some of us can do both.
 
I know music preferences are highly variable but anybody have a killer Spotify (or other) playlist for indoor training?
 
jShort said:
One of the most motivating parts of indoor training is thinking that your competition is not doing it. In my head, they're all sitting on the couch eating Doritos and ice cream... Looking at the weather like "hm, maybe tomorrow".
Click to expand...

That's funny.. I think somewhat similarly... with a slight difference... they are all shackled to their exercise bikes because of the weather ;)
 
Road the new trainer early this morning. Rouvy worked fine on my ancient laptop. I left the video running and would glance over at the video feed to see the top of hills coming up. this is nice.
It all works great on my phone too but I have to like hold the phone in my hand. Guess I should order up a phone mount so I have the option.
 
gtluke said:
"No one wants to get up at 4 and run when it's pitch-dark, but it has to be done. The only reason i do it so early is because i believe the other guy isn't doing it and that gives me a little edge"
-Mike Tyson

His other famous quotes are a little more colorful.
Click to expand...

The other guys weren't getting face tattoos either.
 
gtluke said:
Road the new trainer early this morning. Rouvy worked fine on my ancient laptop. I left the video running and would glance over at the video feed to see the top of hills coming up. this is nice.
It all works great on my phone too but I have to like hold the phone in my hand. Guess I should order up a phone mount so I have the option.
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Do you ear tights on the trainer?
 
gtluke said:
this is nice.
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I'll be trying Rouvy this week at some point. Glad you're digging the trainer.
Processing has always been a problem with Zwift. Lots of folks back in the beta days were using old gaming platforms. Having a robust graphic card did a lot for the experience. I guess it's a bit calmer now, but it was a shock, realizing that this effing platform was eating all my processing power. I tried watching a video on the same Mac once. Like trying to figure out where your captors are taking you while staring through a potato sack. I'm told.
Looking forward to the Android update. They say 2018, and they're usually good about targets like that.
Also, please don't mention the underpants again.
 
seanrunnette said:
I'll be trying Rouvy this week at some point. Glad you're digging the trainer.
Processing has always been a problem with Zwift. Lots of folks back in the beta days were using old gaming platforms. Having a robust graphic card did a lot for the experience. I guess it's a bit calmer now, but it was a shock, realizing that this effing platform was eating all my processing power. I tried watching a video on the same Mac once. Like trying to figure out where your captors are taking you while staring through a potato sack. I'm told.
Looking forward to the Android update. They say 2018, and they're usually good about targets like that.
Also, please don't mention the underpants again.
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I was most put back by the fact that they (zwift) and all the other competitors that dcrainmaker mentioned went this route. In today's world of netflix and spotify and youtube, all the crunching is happening in the cloud (someone else's computer). It's somewhat easier for the developers too, they would be programming for one system, the amazon or google or home made data center. And when you log onto zwift it wouldn't matter what platform you are using, it would crunch the 3d for you and just send you whatever video is appropriate for your screen and system. It could send me a 64x64 black and white stream for my gameboy, or a 4k stream for an up to date roku or smart TV. Video scaling is totally figured out and open source. this is how netflix operates and I'm sure even spotify alters it's stream depending on what system you are using. I'm actually curious if a beast like netflix actually has 40 copies of stranger things all in different formats or if they have one studio version they decode on the fly for each user type. hmmm would be cool to see how that all operates. The hangup would be getting sensor and trainer info back to zwift, but most everything is bluetooth and everyone has a cell phone.
There are video game services that do this so kids don't have to have an up to date gaming rig that costs 4 grand to play the latest games. You just lease time on their server, and use their games, and it's inexpensive monthly. Kids can't even buy gaming rigs anymore because every powerful video card is sold out for months due to bitcoin miners.
I'm surprised that nobody else here has had this issue or they just read the minimum requirements and didn't pursue. A computer with a modern processor and 2gb of dedicated video ram is not a cheap or common computer. And 99.99% of all internet can be done on a 10 year old jalopy with 10% of those specs. Especially today with streaming, you don't even need to have the processor to play your AVI files, the decoded mp4 just gets streamed right to you. And personally I almost never use a computer at home, if I didn't do the photo thing I'm not sure I would even have a computer. Maybe a chromebook so I can type faster. But I can also just plug a mouse, monitor, and keyboard into my phone and do that.
Just seems odd. The home computer is dying, I thought it was about dead.
 
gtluke said:
I'm actually curious if a beast like netflix actually has 40 copies of stranger things all in different formats or if they have one studio version they decode on the fly for each user type.
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I was always wondering this too, how one file can be accessed by millions of people simultaneously, or if every time somebody requests to watch, it copies the file into some sort or RAM reserved for the watcher. Netflix is hosted on Amazon servers though.
 
I wonder if there isn't some bar to scaling up with that model? Do small companies work on that same supplier side crunching model, or is having a pipe that wide too much for a start-up? From everything I've read, despite their strangle-hold on the market, Zwift is a small operation.
 
Yeah everyone just uses amazon's servers.
@1sh0t1b33r you can access the file multiple times. I have a home NAS server in my attic that can stream four 4k movies to multiple users off a shitty celeron processor. they can all be watching the same file with different resolutions and bitrates. It just crunches the file and streams it out but since the original file isn't being modified it can be accessed multiple times at once.
But i'm actually curious now if netflix has figured out that storage is cheaper and just has all or most formats covered. Probably not though, doesn't it degrade if your connection slows? and then jumps back to 1080p when your connection is faster? probably means it's doing it on the fly. But they could also be jumping back and forth between files or transcoding only when it's degraded.
Wild.
@seanrunnette netflix has data servers all over the world, they aren't all hosted at the same spot, that pipe would be too big. They are known to have small servers in apartment buildings just to serve those residents. I'm sure not all content is available locally like that but it would cut down on trafic a ton if 80% of it was served without even hitting the internet.
this is actually the basis for net nutrality. netflix is the fuse to that bomb, everyone is pissed about how much data they are responsible for. They only pay for their local connection but networks around the country are crushed by it and the local providers want netflix to pay for the upgrades. Which they have refused. They did just settle with comcast? someone.. for like 30m or something nuts. Early on when Level 3 started attacking netflix somewhere in @Norm 's blogs i wrote about shoring netflix because of it. Netflix and the consumer won that argument but last month it was overturned. time will tell if providers and backbone companies will start billing netflix or the consumer for that data now that they are allowed to.
 
gtluke said:
In today's world of netflix and spotify and youtube, all the crunching is happening in the cloud (someone else's computer).
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I'm not sure why you think Zwift's challenge has any similarity to netflix, etc. Delivering fixed content efficiently is a completely different problem from creating it in real time, even accounting for the capability to respond dynamically to changing network conditions. All the sites you mention are just streaming pre-processed files to you. The computationally expensive processing is paid for once, up front. Zwift has to create the content in real time, just like every other graphics-intensive game. To do what you think is so trivial would require a cloud of GPUs, one per active user. Nobody's going to pay for that.

You hardly need a beast of a machine to run Zwift. I built up a low end gaming computer (Nvidia 1050 Ti) but was running it successfully with a 3 yo laptop using onboard intel graphics chip.
 
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