What is 'Mediaserver' and why is it draining my battery so much?

[Groid]

A corrupt media file on an external sdcard can cause the media server drain. My wife's phone had a bad music file that created all kinds of hell until I found and deleted it.

 

[Bit Fiddler]

Well I just found this thread because I am having this problem as well. I do not have a screen shot for you but here is the info...

Galaxy Note 2

7h 37m 38s on battery
2% battery remaining

Media Server: 75%
Screen: 13%
Android System: 6%
Task Manager: 2%
Android OS: 2%
Cell Standby: 2%
Device Idle: 2%




the phone was supposedly in "sleep" mode the entire time. the GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth/NFC/S-Beam etc. are all off.
I put it in my locker at work this morning after a fresh charge on both the internal phone battery, and the external battery in the case.

now 7 hours later not only is the internal battery gone, but also the external case battery is drained. this configuration normally has lasted me 2 or more days of normal usage. this power drain is something fairly recent as I have not noticed it before. Just as a reference, the external case battery is 4200 mAh and the internal phone battery is 3100 mAh. So this 7 hours was basically the equivalent of 2 fully charged internal batteries.

If this is caused by a corrupt file on my SD card as speculated here, how can I find this file? is there any way to track down the culprit?





###############EDIT################

Ok did a bit of digging; as this was a new issue I went back to the last few days of app installs and looked what there may have been. I found an "assistant" app that uses voice activation.... no surprise that when I disable the voice activation the CPU usage of this app drops from 26% to 2%. Reported by watchdog live "real time" monitoring. I am guessing I have found the culprit.

 

[grandpa2390]

for everyone else who keeps stressing that it is only 20 or 30 or 60 percent of 4%, that makes no difference. yes it may only have taken 1.x % of battery life so far, but that is not the information that concerns us. What concerns me is how much it is taking in the long term. thats what the battery chart seems to do. it is extrapolating for me. it is saying if this process continues to run at this rate of power consumption, by the time your battery completes a cycle it will have used 60% of your battery. which would be horrible if what people here are saying is not true. especially if you are not doing anything with sound.
as it happens i had been playing a game and was unaware that mediaserver was a kind of middleman. and i was concerned when i saw that the rate it was consuming power over the last few hours was significantly higher than the graphic and sound intensive game i was playing. but since i know now that it is handling the sound, i am ok with it now as im sure a major part of the visuals of the game (like the backlight) fall under the screen which is hogging more power than everything else combined.
anyways im no longer doing anything with sound and im hitting the refresh button every few minutes to see if it will give a percent or 2 to chrome or any other app i may run

Update: 10% later
I have had chrome open and nothing else for the last loss of 10% battery. the numbers havent changed. so either these numbers are averaged of every cycle i have completed or i have a lot of corrupted media files or whatever it is others are saying it does.
either way, im satisfied with the responses those have given about the purpose. 17% isnt bad. now if it starts using 75% or 45% when im just web browsing, i think it will be time for a fresh wipe and install.

 

[ZephyrsDream]

For some reason mine is also having this problem. I think I've isolated it to the Google Play Music app but it's strange because I haven't even downloaded anything from Google Play Music, nor have I started using their All Access service. Any help?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using AC Forums mobile app

 

[Jimmy Sez]

I've been banging around with this issue for a while, here is what I know so far:

• It happens on multiple types of hardware
• It happened to me on both stock JB 4.2.1 AND CM 10.1.0 (current OS is CM 10.1.0 on Galaxy S3 i747H)
• I doubt the root cause is a specific application, but I suspect this is OS bug. I have read this dates back to 2010.
• I have tried the various tweaks; reformat SD, look for wonky file names, corrupt files etc, etc.

See my screen shots for the wakelocks and battery stats as Mediaserver and AudioIn do their best to kill my battery. ONE CORRELATION I just noticed is this; I am losing the audio notification for events (text message, email), and this seems to coincide with the mediaserver drain/wakelock occurring. I suspect a connection between the lost audio notification and the wakelock under AudioIn.

I have tried everything I can think of and it's a dead end at the moment and very annoying. Any further suggestions are appreciated.

 

[Tronmech]

My experience back in the froyo days on my old G2 was that some media files can confuse the media scanner. If you're also noticing that newly added MP3s aren't showing up in your player, or new pictures aren't showing up in the gallery, this is likely what is happening. Fixing it is a pain because you have to remove all of it from your device and replace it under controlled conditions.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 4

 

[VictorMikle]

Hey all. I have also experienced this phenomenon with the mediaserver component DESTROYING my battery life.

Let me relate my experience and extrapolate my theory.

I have a Sony Xperia Z. I always have my WiFi on and everything else disabled (data/gps/bt etc.). On a full charge my battery lasted me about 2 days. Then 2 weeks ago that dropped dramatically where my phone would not last a single day. I checked the battery usage and sure enough mediaserver was the culprit. Up to 70% of the battery would be used by it and the phone would be hot when picked up from sleep.

Now I know this 1 thing: technology does not just up and change by itself, either I or a 3rd party had caused this. So I retraced the last 2 weeks to see if there had been any updates or if I had done anything different. Sure enough I had installed an app called SleepBot.

Uninstalled the app, and battery is back to normal. As I sit here the phone is sitting on 91% battery with 6.5 hours of usage.

My conclusion: mediaserver by itself is not the problem. The problem is probably an app that uses the mediaserver component. Either by design or by fault.

 

[gquiring]

Same issue with my SG3. This started recently.

 

[adin finitum]

my problem with the mediaserver went away when I did the following two things. Not sure which did it because I tried both of them at the same time:
First I cleared the media storage data, which is at Settings > applications> all > Media Storage > force stop, clear data, disable and reboot.

I then cleared the bsplayer cache...

I then re-enabled Media Storage and all was well.

I tend to suspect that it was a bad subtitle download or a bad thumbnail was causing the excessive load.... So I think it's +1 for the corrupted file theory....

 

[Mitko Keramitciev]

Re: What is 'Mediaserver' and why is it draining my battery so mu

Hi, I had the very same problem with Android 4.1.2. tablet. Tried everything found on several forums, and the result was - nothing worked. Mediaserver kept draining my battery.
Intuitively, I tried two things:
1. Unmounted SD card where I keep all sorts of media files.
2. Deleted downloaded PICTURES from "download" folder.

Result = problem SOLVED.

Then remounted the SD card - battery life still normal!

Conclusion: bloody mediaserver keeps scanning the downloaded pictures and drains the battery.

Simplicity is always the answer!

 

[AndroidLady]

lol. a comedic interruption no doubt

 

[Golfdriver97]

Welcome to Android Central.

I would guess the OS is having a hard time reading a media file. Do you have any music or pictures on your device

 

[Kishor Ramani]

Mediaserver is backend process of Gallery and video player application.
so when you are open its started.

 

[Scorpio2177]

Here is a picture of my current battery stats:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/32150068/Screenshot_2012-07-29-19-02-45.png

So what exactly is Mediaserver? I haven't done much video or picture viewing on my phone. Used a little bit of youtube app, is that counted under Mediaserver, or under it's own separate category?

Note that I listen to music constantly via Rocket Player (as seen in screenshot above), is Mediaserver linked to that somehow? Since Rocket Player is already at 18% that would total to 48% battery drain just off local music (not online streaming).

So I'm trying to figure out which app is using up all this battery, I don't have an actual 'Mediaserver' app, so I know it's another app that's accessing 'Mediaserver'. Any information would be great since my battery is draining hard from this and yet I don't think I'm actually using this app at all.

So is the app you're referring to, the following APK:
com.samsung.android.nearby.mediaserver