Mediaserver process draining my battery

[swchoi89]

Hi guys,

Ok, so I disconnected my battery charger to my phone at around 2am.

I woke up at around 7am to see that my battery went down by about 6% and 60%+ was attributed to the Mediaserver app/process.

This never happened before. What could be causing this? I see that the cpu usage has been more than 2 hours, and I wasn't using my phone at all between 2am to 7am.

I am using Galaxy Note 3.

Thanks!

 

[gorcorps]

Read this thread for some extra info: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2447648

Basically what happens is that your phone will do a media update at times to keep your gallery and other media lists up to date, and if you have corrupted files it'll cause that process to hang which kills your battery. Chances are it's something on your external card, but it doesn't have to be. Quick way to test that would be to pop out your SD card for a day and see if it helps... then you know it's on the card at least. You could probably reformat it and reload what you want which would be the quickest IMO.

 

[dawheat]

Yeah assuming you're not actually playing any music/videos, then it sounds like the indexing service.

I found that I didn't get any non-usage indexing battery drain when I pointed my media players to only scan the single folder my music and videos are respectively.

However, when I do launch my music player in the morning during my commute, there is a good 10-15 minutes of CPU on time (vs the hour or so app open time) which I'm assuming is the indexing service running.

However with the Note 3, I find I'm very rarely low on battery power at the end of the day so I haven't tried to limit it any further.

 

[swchoi89]

Read this thread for some extra info: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2447648

Basically what happens is that your phone will do a media update at times to keep your gallery and other media lists up to date, and if you have corrupted files it'll cause that process to hang which kills your battery. Chances are it's something on your external card, but it doesn't have to be. Quick way to test that would be to pop out your SD card for a day and see if it helps... then you know it's on the card at least. You could probably reformat it and reload what you want which would be the quickest IMO.

Thanks for the link, I will take a look.

And my external SD card has way too many files on it. I will need to find those corrupt files, but people mention of these 0KB files? It'll take loads of time to find all these 🙁

 

[swchoi89]

Yeah assuming you're not actually playing any music/videos, then it sounds like the indexing service.

I found that I didn't get any non-usage indexing battery drain when I pointed my media players to only scan the single folder my music and videos are respectively.

However, when I do launch my music player in the morning during my commute, there is a good 10-15 minutes of CPU on time (vs the hour or so app open time) which I'm assuming is the indexing service running.

However with the Note 3, I find I'm very rarely low on battery power at the end of the day so I haven't tried to limit it any further.

Thanks. Can you explain how you pointed your media players to only scan the single folder or whatever?

What's your typical usage is like on your Note 3? and how long can you last with medium usage? I can last for about 2 days, and still have about 20%.

 

[gorcorps]

Thanks for the link, I will take a look.

And my external SD card has way too many files on it. I will need to find those corrupt files, but people mention of these 0KB files? It'll take loads of time to find all these 🙁

Depends... In Windows Explorer you can view by detail and filter by file size, so that should help some.

 

[Milan Kerslager]

I had "Media" on the first place in battery chart (under Settings). It was caused by "face recognition of my friends" inside all photos and videos I put inside my phone and MicroSD card. This could be simply disabled by going to Gallery application (Samsung's default tool for viewing photos and videos). Go to main home screen (press main hardware button in the middle under display), then touch Apps (should be in the lower right corner of your display), find Gallery (by sweeping left/right), inside Gallery press Menu button (left softkey), choose Settings and there disable "Tag buddy" and "Face tag". You may unset (switch off) all "Cloud sync" too (probably Dropbox sync at least) - touch it and switch off all syncs (Pictures, Videos, Documents). You may try to enable something and check out your battery chart in Settings again (you have to fully recharge to reset battery usage chart under Settings).
Hope it helps.

 

[aDummy]

As said in the title, disabling "Tag buddy" fixed my battery drain problem. (I didn't even know that option was on.) Thank you Milan Kerslager! 🙂

I had "Media" on the first place in battery chart (under Settings). It was caused by "face recognition of my friends" inside all photos and videos I put inside my phone and MicroSD card. This could be simply disabled by going to Gallery application (Samsung's default tool for viewing photos and videos). Go to main home screen (press main hardware button in the middle under display), then touch Apps (should be in the lower right corner of your display), find Gallery (by sweeping left/right), inside Gallery press Menu button (left softkey), choose Settings and there disable "Tag buddy" and "Face tag". You may unset (switch off) all "Cloud sync" too (probably Dropbox sync at least) - touch it and switch off all syncs (Pictures, Videos, Documents). You may try to enable something and check out your battery chart in Settings again (you have to fully recharge to reset battery usage chart under Settings).
Hope it helps.

 

[raydos]

Thank you Milan Kerslager, disabling the "Tag Buddy" took out Mediaserver as the main battery drain on my phone too.