BitGym tours require a healthy internet connection to stream or download. This guide is designed to help you if you notice slow downloads or see "Buffering" or similar notifications frequently during workouts.

Frequent buffering or low quality video

Each tour inside BitGym is streamed via "adaptive bitrate streaming". That's just a fancy way to say the video quality will automatically adjust to your internet connection. If your video looks blurry it likely means your internet connection speed to your device isn't fast enough. If you see 'Buffering...' displayed on the screen it might mean you are below even the minimum bandwidth level required for our baseline video quality, or it might mean your connection speed is inconsistent and is shifting between high and low bandwidth conditions repeatedly.

Things you can try to resolve either problem:

Ensure you're using WiFi

If you're on a phone, you may want to ensure you're on wifi and not cellular. If you're on both that is fine, your phone will automatically prefer to use the wifi connection.

Testing Wifi Speed

Place your phone or tablet on the machine as normal. This is important because the location of the device in your house matters. Sometimes even being on the cardio machine can impact your available wifi signal due to the metal in the machine.

Once it is placed, visit https://fast.com on your web browser. That page will automatically run a internet speed test for you. After a few seconds you should have a result. In general 10 Mbps or higher download is a good speed to have, while 5Mbps should be sufficient for lower quality streaming.

If you have less than "megabit" the result may show a "Kbps" or "kilobit per second" result which indicates your connection isn't currently fast enough for reliably streaming.

Fixes for Slow Wifi

If you have a slow result (under 2Mbps or anything in the Kbps range), try moving your device very close to your wifi router and running the test again.

If it's significantly faster this indicates a problem with your local wifi link when you are in the exercise location. This could be either due to walls/floors/ceilings blocking the way or it might mean your exercise machine's metal frame is interfering with your signal.

Note: You may also want to try power cycling your wifi router and/or modem to try increasing internet speed.

If it's the same speed this means your home internet connection isn't quite fast enough to stream BitGym. In this case you should download tours before using them as described in the next section.

Downloaded Tours

You can always download tours locally to the device so you can use them offline at full quality. Before starting any tour you can instead tap the "download" button in the top right. When it reaches 100% you can press Start and instead of streaming the tour you will play it back from local storage.

All your downloaded tours are available from the "Saved" tour grouping which you can access from the main tour select menu via the button in the top left.

Downloads not starting

Offline tours are between 1 and 2 GB each, compressed for downloads. After downloading, you need an additional 1GB of free space for the decompression process before BitGym can delete the compressed package. Once decompressed this 1GB of space is freed again. If you do not have 2GB of free space the download may not start. Usually you will be shown an error to this effect.

Downloads are slow

If you're on a particularly slow internet connection it might day a day or two to complete such a download. In this case you might not even see progress on the download, it may seem like it is "stuck" at 0% when really it's just taking a long time to progress to the 1% mark. If this is happening we suggest moving your device closer to your wifi router, keeping your device plugged into power, and allowed to run the download overnight. If it's still too slow, you may need to upgrade your internet connection or download your tours on a different internet connection.

If your device has an SD card that BitGym can detect, we will prioritize downloading here. The first download to an SD card can be a bit slow, depending on the bus speed between your SD card and phone (as well as the internet), but subsequent downloads should be faster.