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How fast should my battery be draining while watching a video?

lightsleeper23

lightsleeper23

Android Enthusiast
Ok, I've been noticing that, on average, my battery drains 1% every 2 minutes! That seems astonishing to me. In not even talking about streaming from Netflix or anything either. Just a video or movie on my SD card, watching with MX player or v player. I can be at 99% battery, watch a 45 minute video, and be at 76%. Is this normal for Android phones?
 
That seems a little high to me, but it depends on your phone.

I know there have been some phones, like the thunderbolt with notoriously bad batteries, where that may be somewhat average drain while watching videos. Most phones I would expect to be around double that.
 
It sounds about right. Do you have anything else running at the same time. I also us Mx player for movies but you have to remember that while watching a movie your phones hardware start using things constantly over x period of time. Ex video card processor and ram. Which depending on the way you use your device will get breaks or idle down throughout the day so seems OK. If it makes you feel any better lol when I play zenonia 4 ill get like maybe an hr of play without being on my charger. Even then if I play and try and charge my phone it will go from like 45 to 47 percent in an hr cause of the game so I'd say your OK hopefully some other ppl from forum can shed some light on this situation
 
SirSpace said:
It sounds about right. Do you have anything else running at the same time. I also us Mx player for movies but you have to remember that while watching a movie your phones hardware start using things constantly over x period of time. Ex video card processor and ram. Which depending on the way you use your device will get breaks or idle down throughout the day so seems OK. If it makes you feel any better lol when I play zenonia 4 ill get like maybe an hr of play without being on my charger. Even then if I play and try and charge my phone it will go from like 45 to 47 percent in an hr cause of the game so I'd say your OK hopefully some other ppl from forum can shed some light on this situation
Click to expand...

Zombie Smash was my big drainer, about an hour without a charger. But there is constant swiping, touching, input, etc. plus I keep everything syncing all the time.
 
My battery has a pretty respectable battery life usually. Most days it will last a good 18 to 20 hours with moderate use. Some days it drains really fast, with Android System being the culprit, at the top of the list with up to 75%. That's something else I have to figure out, but that's a whole different story. I only have Twitter and gmail set to auto sync, which uses very little I think due to how little activity I have on them. Like I said, normal usage gets me through the day fairly easy, so the video players extreme usage gets to me.
I tried a different player from MX, which is why I downloaded Vplayer, but it seems to be the same.
 
Depends a lot on the video file as well. Is it an HD video? Or something whose resolution is greater than the phone's native resolution? Is the codec hardware supported or is your phone using software decoding to play it? Too many factors to take note if.
 
Thanks chanchan, I was beginning to think the same thing. It's just all different files downloaded from torrent sites so I rely on the codecs in MX player. A lot are in HD as well.
 
1. If the video resolution is greater than the phone native, then it uses more battery than other videos because of the rescaling.

2. If the video codec is not hardware supported, it would use more battery because instead of the GPU, the CPU will handle everything
 
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