TL: DR - Use Rescan Media, win.
So, I think that I've finally found the source of my constant stress regarding the battery life of my beautiful Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.
I know that a good majority of you have just rolled your eyes in disbelief, or just thought to yourself, "Great....another one of these threads".
If it helps one person get their battery life under control, then roll away.
I've had the phone for about 2-3 months and I've been active on these boards since a few days after getting it.
I've recalibrated, done the on / off / on / off trick, battery stats delete, deleted battery info from CWM, tried a second battery, used battery monitors on the phone, turned off wi-fi, turned off auto-synch, turned off bluetooth, lowered display brightness, and everything else I could think of to conserve juice.
Yesterday afternoon, I downloaded OSMonitor from the market in an effort to try another app in a long line of failures.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I was going to give up hope.
While installed, I had clicked on the box to monitor the app in the notification bar.
I noticed that I would have times where the CPU was being maxed but nothing strange was being reported in OSMonitor.
And then it hit me.....
The entire time I'm watching the OSMonitor, I'm being distracted by the media scanner.
It's running over and over and over and over and over.
When the screen shuts off after 30 seconds, it comes back on, the media scanner runs.
When I update something from the market, the media scanner runs.
When I close a program, the media scanner runs.
It is running constantly and maxing my CPU to 100%.
It finishes fairly quickly, (I have 9.4GB / 13GB available on internal and hardly anything used on my 4GB external SD card) but it just KEEPS....ON.....RUNNING.
I do a quick search, stumble upon the .nomedia file trick from XDA archives, and VOILA ! ! ! !
I'm losing about only one half of one percent per hour while it sits on standby, where I would sometimes lose 10-11% per hour, when the phone isn't even being used by me.
I went to bed last night with 48% at around 3:30am.
It is approx. 11 hours later right now.
I've made approx. 8-10 calls, checked my email a few dozen times, and mostly just let the phone sit.
I'm sitting at 39%.
Previous to doing this, I would have lost that amount in one hour.
So, for anyone who has a phone that is losing battery life like it's going out of style, I highly recommend doing the .nomedia fix.
I did mine using ES Explorer and Super Manager.
Go into your root folder and add a file named .nomedia, then go into your external SD folder and do the exact same thing.
If you do not want to do it this way, you can go the easy route and add a program called Rescan Media that does it for you.
(link supplied)
Hopefully this helps at least one lost soul, I'm so happy to see my phone behave more along the lines of what my expectations were and not have to be fully charged 2 times per day.
For the record, I've tried the following ROM's for the Cappy:
Perception
Phoenix
Assonance
Darkytt3r's port of Darky's ROM
Stock ROM (ODIN Rooted)
Cognition
And the following kernels:
Glitterballs
SpeedMod
SetiroN
Xcalibur
Will this not cause the media scanner to not pick up anything at all then?
IE no custom ringtones/msg alerts, nothing displayed in gallery, playlists wont work with the music player....
Or will it run media scanner selectively instead of all the time?
The only time I notice media scanner running is after rebooting the phone... yet I'm still only getting about 9-10 hours on a full charge with very conservative use.
evoic said:
TL: DR - Use Rescan Media, win.
So, I think that I've finally found the source of my constant stress regarding the battery life of my beautiful Samsung Captivate SGH-i897.
I know that a good majority of you have just rolled your eyes in disbelief, or just thought to yourself, "Great....another one of these threads".
If it helps one person get their battery life under control, then roll away.
I've had the phone for about 2-3 months and I've been active on these boards since a few days after getting it.
I've recalibrated, done the on / off / on / off trick, battery stats delete, deleted battery info from CWM, tried a second battery, used battery monitors on the phone, turned off wi-fi, turned off auto-synch, turned off bluetooth, lowered display brightness, and everything else I could think of to conserve juice.
Yesterday afternoon, I downloaded OSMonitor from the market in an effort to try another app in a long line of failures.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary so I was going to give up hope.
While installed, I had clicked on the box to monitor the app in the notification bar.
I noticed that I would have times where the CPU was being maxed but nothing strange was being reported in OSMonitor.
And then it hit me.....
The entire time I'm watching the OSMonitor, I'm being distracted by the media scanner.
It's running over and over and over and over and over.
When the screen shuts off after 30 seconds, it comes back on, the media scanner runs.
When I update something from the market, the media scanner runs.
When I close a program, the media scanner runs.
It is running constantly and maxing my CPU to 100%.
It finishes fairly quickly, (I have 9.4GB / 13GB available on internal and hardly anything used on my 4GB external SD card) but it just KEEPS....ON.....RUNNING.
I do a quick search, stumble upon the .nomedia file trick from XDA archives, and VOILA ! ! ! !
I'm losing about only one half of one percent per hour while it sits on standby, where I would sometimes lose 10-11% per hour, when the phone isn't even being used by me.
I went to bed last night with 48% at around 3:30am.
It is approx. 11 hours later right now.
I've made approx. 8-10 calls, checked my email a few dozen times, and mostly just let the phone sit.
I'm sitting at 39%.
Previous to doing this, I would have lost that amount in one hour.
So, for anyone who has a phone that is losing battery life like it's going out of style, I highly recommend doing the .nomedia fix.
I did mine using ES Explorer and Super Manager.
Go into your root folder and add a file named .nomedia, then go into your external SD folder and do the exact same thing.
If you do not want to do it this way, you can go the easy route and add a program called Rescan Media that does it for you.
(link supplied)
Hopefully this helps at least one lost soul, I'm so happy to see my phone behave more along the lines of what my expectations were and not have to be fully charged 2 times per day.
For the record, I've tried the following ROM's for the Cappy:
Perception
Phoenix
Assonance
Darkytt3r's port of Darky's ROM
Stock ROM (ODIN Rooted)
Cognition
And the following kernels:
Glitterballs
SpeedMod
SetiroN
Xcalibur
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So... exactly what did you do to solve the problem? can you describe how do you do the .nomedia fix?? I have exactly the same issue..
Hm, I haven't experienced that bad of a battery drain, but I installed the market app even though it said 2.2... maybe this will make my battery life better! Thanks for the tip.
It's running over and over and over and over and over.
When the screen shuts off after 30 seconds, it comes back on, the media scanner runs.
When I update something from the market, the media scanner runs.
When I close a program, the media scanner runs.
It is running constantly and maxing my CPU to 100%.
It finishes fairly quickly, (I have 9.4GB / 13GB available on internal and hardly anything used on my 4GB external SD card) but it just KEEPS....ON.....RUNNING.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When you say the media scanner runs when doing all of these actions, does the Media Scanning icon show in the notification bar? If so, then I think it's just an issue with your phone cause I don't think that happens with anyone else's phone.
Unless you are saying that the media scanner runs in the background secretly after every action and there is no icon in the notification bar or anything? If so, I think you can be on to something.
GTIVRon said:
Will this not cause the media scanner to not pick up anything at all then?
IE no custom ringtones/msg alerts, nothing displayed in gallery, playlists wont work with the music player....
Or will it run media scanner selectively instead of all the time?
The only time I notice media scanner running is after rebooting the phone... yet I'm still only getting about 9-10 hours on a full charge with very conservative use.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You could just run Media Scanner manually. SwitchPro even gives you a button to initiate it. The only time Media Scanner runs automatically for me is when the phone boots (and probably some other infrequent times that I can't remember) so disabling automatic media scanning isn't much of a loss at all for me.
GTIVRon said:
Will this not cause the media scanner to not pick up anything at all then?
IE no custom ringtones/msg alerts, nothing displayed in gallery, playlists wont work with the music player....
Or will it run media scanner selectively instead of all the time?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm curious of the same thing. I've only seen the media scanner run when I restart or disconnect my SD card from my computer.
trekie86 said:
I'm curious of the same thing. I've only seen the media scanner run when I restart or disconnect my SD card from my computer.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
trying to get it working... ill report wassup after...
minlee85 said:
evoic said:
TL: DR - Use Rescan Media, win.
...
I did mine using ES Explorer and Super Manager.
Go into your root folder and add a file named .nomedia, then go into your external SD folder and do the exact same thing.
If you do not want to do it this way, you can go the easy route and add a program called Rescan Media that does it for you.
(link supplied)
...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So... exactly what did you do to solve the problem? can you describe how do you do the .nomedia fix?? I have exactly the same issue..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'll be nice... see the quoted paragraph that was in your quote?
Minlee, no need to quote an entire post, especially when you aren't responding to something in it directly.
As others have said, I only ever see Media Scanning in the Notification bar when I do a reboot. If it runs at other times it is transparent to the phone.
This is probably an issue specific to myself and a few others.
Someone above asked me if I saw a lot of activity in the background or if I actually saw the "Media Scanning" icon pop up in my notification bar.
The answer is that I saw the icon pop up and then watched it scan, over and over and over, all day long, dozens....if not hundreds of times.
That little fix, coupled with the battery calibration that I've done a few times, along with getting rid of some of the resource hogs that run in the background (Do I reeeeally need Google Maps to run 23 hours out of the day???) has given my Captivate new life.
evoic said:
This is probably an issue specific to myself and a few others.
Someone above asked me if I saw a lot of activity in the background or if I actually saw the "Media Scanning" icon pop up in my notification bar.
The answer is that I saw the icon pop up and then watched it scan, over and over and over, all day long, dozens....if not hundreds of times.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah, I've never seen that kind of behavior. I only see the scanning activity when I first boot and when I do something like take a picture or a screen shot.
So in my glallery, some of my images have doubled, and in my music list for selecting ringstones and such, it has tripled some of the songs, but only one of them works. Mediaserver has 48% percent on my battery drain and its taking more power than my screen is! Anyone know whats up with this?
I'm running AOKPS Alpha 2, but I noticed it was doing it last night when I was still on the Alpha.
I use quicpic for my pictures....no issues
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alensw.PicFolder
And google play for my music
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.music
This is actual issue with the media scanner. From what I've read it's an issue that can happen from a few things. I seem to have fixed it for now, I removed all the media files that were acting up. and it's gone back to it's normal amount of battery usage. I may just format my sdcard, then reinstall the ROM again
Sent from my SGH-I997 using XDA
I've got a SGS running ICS. But for some unknown reason I've noticed that media storage is always running in the background making the CPU run at max clock all the time, which is killing the battery.
I think it might be unable to scan everything for some reason as quite alot of my photos are missing from my gallery.
Clearing the data of media storage stops it running, but I lose all the photos from the gallery and all notifications. I can use an app called Scanmedia to get all the notifications back, and only some of the photos for some reason. But media storage continues to run in background draining my battery.
Like I said earlier I think it might be a scanning bug. Unable to scan all media, so it doesn't stop scanning. That's just my guess though.
How can I fix this?
Hey guys!
So I realize there are already a lot of topics on this on other phones, but not for the N5.
I've tried the solutions posted on the other phones but they don't seem to work.
Mediaserver seems to take a consistent 10-20% of my battery drain. When I reboot my phone, it jumps up to 30-40%, which is expected because the phone is scanning everything at boot. However, even after a few hours after, if I check the time on mediaserver, it still increases, meaning it's still being used.
My N5 is pretty bare, media wise. I have ~3 gigs of songs and like 50 pictures on it. I've tried removing all my pictures and music, but the mediaserver is still active and takes the same amount %.
I've tried Rescan Media root, but I'm guessing that's not compatible for 4.4 yet because it crashes every time I open it.
I've read that better battery stats can help identify it, but all I see on the stats are that mediaserver is taking up battery. I already knew that.
I've also read that mediaserver could be active due to an application, but the solutions associated to this problem involved uninstalling one app at a time and checking mediaserver; I don't have time for this method.
Anyways, any help would be greatly appreciated.
I am running the latest Cataclysm ROM and Faux kernels.
Thanks!
I want to add the information that during testing the drain times, I have not listened to music or played youtube, etc. Nothing media related.
Mediaserver will show up as the culprit even if it is an app you have installed.
i.e. I found my battery dead (at 11pm) which was odd for me, so I checked and saw mediaserver at 40% usage. I put on my detective hat and worked out it was a game I installed (Robot Unicorn 2), which is very poorly coded so that if you dont completely quit it (swipe it away), it will constantly be playing in the background, it will keep your device awake and constantly play music (that you cant hear).
You will have to work it out, or install a bettery battery app to work out which app it is.
The day before yesterday I decided to reset/repair the phone from sony companion in an attempt to solve the battery drain (I think due to cell radio standby, shown as the biggest consumer in the power management list) and trying to install one app at a time to figure if app-related.
Right from the start I uninstalled/disabled a few stock apps, including twitter/facebook. I am using however google now, aquamail. As I also suspect spotify to be a huge drainer I didn't install it yet but I am listening to music from sdcard through poweramp.
So yesterday, first day usage, with moderate usage, was heading to almost 6hrs sot which is a big improvement from 3-4 sot before reset, same usage pattern except spotify.
At 40% batt I updated a few apps amongst them sony albums.
The main sdcard is mostly empty since reset. I have kept however the few photos/video and the music folder on external sdcard.
Right after last night update noticed the phone is draining fast even with screen off. Mediaserver shows some cpu time but also keeping the phone awake the whole time.
So i have cleared cache/data of media storage app, rebooted, put a .nomedia file in the music folder. A couple hours later, battery at 80% after 30 min sot, mediaserver is again keeping my phone awake.
I don't see anything else relevant to this issue on forums aside from things I already did, reset with sdcard wipe included.
Any idea what to try next?
Do you have lot of media on your external sd?
Remove your sd and try.
Please ignore my previous post. the mediaserver indexing might just be legit as I found a huge bunch of pics on my external sdcard, probably copied there before reset. All photos sync is off, imagine mediascanner has trouble with that many files. The solution was for me to delete them as really don't need them on device but you might use the .nomedia file trick.
I have cleared media storage data and restart the app, I expect this to solve it, will let you know if that's not the case