Battery drain when watching videos

Help Fairphone 2
1

Hi there,

I am running LOS in my Fairphone 2, without any of google apps nor open gapps. I have realized that the battery drains quite fast when watching videos, and the phone gets quite hot too. I’d say it gets hot next to the camera approximately.

I watched a 1 hour video and the battery went down from 100% to 70% approximately. Do you think this is normal?

Any advice is welcome.

Regards,

Javi.

2

If it’s a high quality video, streamed from the internet and watched at full brightness I’d say it’s impressive that it didn’t drain more.
If its a low quality video watched at low brightness from a file on the internal storage - with no background activities going on - then it might be a bit more drain than expected.

4 Likes
3

It was actually a YouTube video (I do not like using this kind of service, because of privacy concerns and other reasons, but I was really interested in the video). I am not sure about the quality, but for sure I was not using full brightness, more like half of the bar.

4

I have this problem, too. I am using FP Open OS and since a year or so my phone gets very hot during streams and videos. The battery drain is also very high, sometimes even the charger struggles to charge the phone during those activities.
I still hope that whatever caused this behaviour in some update will get fixed some day.

5

Can anybody please give links to some specific video streams or files with which interested people can try to reproduce the problem on their phones to get a better idea about the scope of this?

2 Likes
6

It is essentially all videos. The one I was talking about was this: https://youtu.be/M56okcfwk1E

Soon I’ll try to make a test with a video in the phone’s memory and in airplane mode and see how it goes.

I have realized recently that when using the camera (pictures and videos) something similar happens, and I had one or two reboots. I’ll probably post this in another post.

1 Like
7

Thanks, so there’s a benchmark.

I’m at LineageOS 20180228 nightly with Open GApps pico 20180228.

Firefox 58.0.2 via WiFi connection:
4% less battery for 10 minutes of video, easily 30% and more if I let this run until the end and battery usage of it stays the same.

“Browser” via WiFi connection, full screen:
4% less battery for 10 minutes of video.

Official Youtube App via WiFi connection, full screen:
4% less battery for 10 minutes of video.

VLC via WiFi connection, full screen, hardware encoding automatic:
4% less battery for 10 minutes of video.

VLC via WiFi connection, full screen, hardware encoding off:
5% less battery for 10 minutes of video, so perhaps 40% or more until the end.

I’m out of time just now, but here are some possibly interesting bits and test videos for further research …

2 Likes
8

Actually, this problem is fixed for me now. Since one of the recent updates, the battery drain and heat generation during streams and videos is less.

2 Likes
9

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.