Download problems
I'm still have plenty of trouble downloading the workouts today. I gave up yesterday after many failed attempts, but the newsletter today gave me some hope that things might go faster now.
I did manage to get Lean Legs & Abs downloaded very early this morning. But trying to start Flex Train after with nothing else downloading resulted in a Network error after I left for work.
I'm trying again now and still have a ridiculously long download time (15 hrs to 1 day.)
I'm really not meaning to complain, as I know things have been hard there this past week. But I do want to post some feedback, so that perhaps it can be improved for next time. I do love downloads, but I don't love still not having access to them when the workouts were in house on Friday.
Lean Legs and Abs looks wonderful and I'm very anxious to try all the workouts, and hopefully I will actually be able to soon.
Let me see if I can help you and several others understand better how a video file download works, what can cause it to take so long and what can be done about it. I'm sure server load on our end is causing some delay problems, but nothing like you're experiencing. As an example, I just did a test on downloading FlexTrain and it only took me 25 minutes to download FlexTrain while it is taking you almost a day to download just one file. Now, to be honest, 25 minutes is rather slow for me to be able to download a one hour video, but I'm also using an old computer that's running Vista with 10 browser windows currently opened. I do have a wired connection and a very fast modem speed. So, why Am I able to download a file so much quicker than you can? Let me see if I can explain this and offer some suggestion that may help you.
Firstly, we use Amazon content servers to handle our downloads. These are the same servers Amazon uses to handle their video files. These servers are maintained by Amazon and there are no settings that we can change or even access. All we do is upload our video files to the Amazon server. Then, as demand increases Amazon automatically replicates and caches our video files on content servers all over the world. So, as far as our end goes there are not any settings that we can adjust or that need to be adjusted. But there are things that you can do that may help you download our video files more quickly.
1. Don't use a wireless connection. Wireless quite often sends data in stop go packets and this filtering can cause all kinds of problems as our server will think you may have decided to stop the download. If you only have a wireless connection you may need to use a pre-loader which will break the video file into smaller pieces and then put them back together. If you need to do this just contact customer service for instructions, but preferably use a wired connection instead.
2. Temporarily disable your virus software. Your virus software may be stopping and pausing your download to scan the incoming data. This can cause huge delays if your virus software and computer are slow and don't have the processing power to scan in real time.
3. Reboot your computer. Your problem may just be that your computer needs to be rebooted so that you can start fresh with everything working at optimal capacity.
4. Make sure you have enough hard disc space to handle your downloads. Each file is about 1 gig.
5. Slow internet speed ?- Nowadays you can get internet speeds of 300 Mbps in many areas. If you only have a download speed of 1.5 Mbps it's going take a long time download 1 gig of information per download. And keep in mind you will almost never get the maximum advertised download speed your provider claims. At 1.5 Mbps under perfect conditions it would theoretically take you 1 hour 30 minutes to download a 1 gig file. But in the real world it would probably take around 4 hours. Most cable modems and Fios are many times faster than the example I just gave, but quite often their speeds will depend on traffic over their networks. Unfortunately, the only solution for this is a faster internet service.
6. Finally, you may want to try downloading late at night if you're having speed issues. Traffic is lower on our servers as well as your ISP's network too.