[HOW-TO] JellyBean - Media storage / Battery drain fix. [11/6/2012]

So here is what I found by trying to stop battery drain caused by the media storage+heating etc. I Of course can't guarantee this working for everybody but I tried this with 2-different JellyBean ROM's twice and it worked all 4 times on my device :victory:

This will have a few Reboots so bare with me. (because I believe reboots make a difference)
For all of you who have a JellyBean ROM already installed and have the battery drain skip to Step.8

1. Download your JellyBean ROM of choice
2. Place on SD card
3. MAKE A NANDROID BACKUP of your current ROM
4. Wipe data, cache and dalvik cache
5. Select ROM of choice from the SD card (Most ROM's these days come with an Aroma-Installer so remember what you picked to be installed and what not.)
6. Boot device
7. Set up the phone and let it restore all apps. Set everything you will use (facebook, e-mail, flipboard etc) -then ReBoot
8. I used TitaniumBackup and removed "Media Storage" and I also removed "Downloads 4.1.1"
9. ReBoot into Recovery & wipe cache and dalvik cache
10.Dirty-Flash your ROM of choice which you chose @ Step.5 and chose the same features if possible.
11.Install your prefered Kernel optional (I personally chose Ktoosez 3.0.49 just because it gave me good battery life)
12.Wipe cache and dalvik the last time and also fix permissions.

13.ReBoot the last time and enjoy!


Hope this was helpful and will work for most of you early JellyBean users. :fingers-crossed:

I think I found the issue...

Well, after reading through countless forums and threads and posts etc etc etc I think I finally found the issue.

First of all, I did download the Rescan Media app, which disables the media scanner on boot, and that is a great workaround. But it just kept bugging me as to why this issue was occurring...

So I decided to finally try to copy off all of my data from my SD card and reformat. One thing I noticed was that the Clockworkmod backup folder, where the nandroid backups are stored, was very large and had a lot of files. Apparently, the older version of CWM nandroid backups put everything into a single large tar file, while the newer version puts everything into blobs as separate small files. The newer method reduces overall backup time and storage usage (across multiple backups) by using de-duplication.

The issue is that it leaves a LOT of files sitting on your SD card. I counted 18,000+ files on my SD card including the blob files! After I copied all of my files to my PC, I deleted the nandroid backups from my SD card and counted about 450 files remaining.

So I did a test: I re-enabled media scanner on boot using the Rescan Media app and rebooted. Using better battery stats, I noticed that the media scanner now runs for only about 2 minutes or so, versus the 10 to 15 minutes it used to run for with every boot. Also, from a cold boot with a freshly charged battery, if I wake the phone up after about 10 minutes after boot, it still reads 100%, whereas before it would read about 95%.

So it appears that the media scanner is not necessarily misbehaving... in fact, it's behaving exactly the way it was intended, which is to scan all the files on your SD card to look for any newly added media files. The problem is that with 18,000+ files to go through, it takes a while and uses CPU.

Did the algorithm change between ICS and JB? Maybe... so maybe there really is an issue. Who knows. But for those of you who are having this issue, check to see how many files you have on your SD card, and if you have a CWM backup that uses the blobs vs tar files, you might want to copy those off.

I think the next CWM backup I do will be in tar format. I don't do backups often enough to reap any benefits of using de-duplication, I pretty much only do a backup before flashing a new ROM and I usually delete older backups as well, and I don't flash that often...

EDIT: By the way, I never do a clean wipe between ROM flashes if they are similar. I went from stock ICS rooted to the I5 leak, to the J1 leak, to the new K1 leak, all without wiping data, only cache and dalvik. I think it's silly to wipe data all the time unless you are going to a completely different base, i.e. from touchwiz to AOSP, or vice versa. Neither Google nor Samsung nor any android manufacturer intends regular users to wipe all data with OTA updates, so why should we? Also, to be clear, I DID NOT end up reformatting my SD card, I left all the files there except for deleting the CWM backup files and blobs, and my problem is now gone without having to disable media scanner on boot.

AJ26T said:

What if u use ROM that doesn't use aroma

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

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hitman980206 said:

So if I'm understanding right removing them after setup then restoring them by fifty flash fixes the issue they cause

Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda premium

---------- Post added at 11:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:44 AM ----------



Then disregard the aroma part and just dirty flash I take it

Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda premium

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Wow your fast! Thanks. And yes deleting then restoring basically. Seems odd but I tried 4x and it worked.
My phone only dropped 7% battery in 9-hours being untouched (sleeping lol)

so here's my experience for what it's worth...

i have been getting the media drain issue with every single tw based jb rom I've flashed. none of the so called fixes ever seemed to permanently fix the issue. Some of them would seem to work for a while, but they were all only temporary.

what I noticed is that it only seems to happen when I boot up my phone, then stop after about 5% of the battery is gone. The reason I know this is because I reboot my phone a lot. I have the official external charger and spare battery. I rarely plug my phone in. After the initial media scan, my phone sleeps like a baby and is ice cold when I reach for it. Also no media scanner wake locks according to better battery stats.

What I'm wondering is if the people who supposedly think they've fixed the issue (not including freezing media scanner) normally reboot their phone, or if they do, if they check for the media scan wake lock right after boot up? I suspect most people leave their phone on and charge as needed, so they may never see the media drain after the initial boot and "fix" if they never reboot?

maybe not, who knows...

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk 2

Mustang302LX said:

Ultimately I blame this issue on the leak and no little tips will work for everyone. I personally got sick of trying to figure it out and download Rescan Media (Root) from the Play Store and just disabled media scanner. Hopefully the official JB fixes this awful issue and if not hey maybe it's time to move on. *shrugs*

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Interesting... But makes sense... I'll explain in a second what my thoughts are...

suzook said:

I have been running clean 4 since day one, and have better bat life than stock tw ics. Why are some having these media issues?

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No or clean SD card... Easy... Let me explain....

prenedo said:

I have a ton of media (on my external sd card) from avi, mkv, flac, mp3/4, as well as 100's of pics synced from Picasa, etc.... The only time I get excessive media drain is when I first flash one of these JB roms. Even from the early jelly wiz leaks, it would happen for like the first day on the ROM, and settle down after a battery cycle. I would assume that a lot of people (not all) are just reacting to the issue too soon after flashing and not giving the ROM a chance to settle.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using xda app-developers app

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Bingo! It has to rebuild the database that is associated with the media files...

Takes time... Has to index videos and images, etc...

tomalrocks said:

this is a well known bug with touchwiz leaked roms with no proper solution. This is why I am using AOSP roms such as CM 10, eclipse rom etc till the issue is sorted out. The battery life is great on AOSP roms.

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Wont beat CleanROM

(Granted I am a bit biased )