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I have a Sony Xperia ZL running Android 4.2.2 . There's a background process named "Mediaserver" which uses most of my battery, while the phone is on standby. If I charge it to 100% and leave it alone, the "Mediaserver" process by itself will account for some 30% of all battery usage after 8 hours or so... Mediaserver manages to have "Keep awake" CONSTANTLY!

I've spent quite a lot of time searching about this, and went around many ideas, including that this excessive battery usage could be caused by some corrupt media (audio/picture/video) file stored on the device. But, despite having flashed several stock ROMs from around the world, without even having any kind of media (or even any app but the stock ones), the problem persists!

I have also tried the apps "Rescan Media Root" and "Mediaserver Killer" from the Play store (of course, I do have root access). For my misfortune, they were not useful.

As a fairly advanced user, who likes to be in control of things, I've tried to find "Mediaserver" under Settings / Apps hoping to stop it but it's not there. I'm believing to have found it under /system/bin/Mediaserver (no extension), but how can I stop it from running all the time? It seems to me that deleting/renaming this file isn't really a good idea.

Ps: I also tried a few Task Managers, but still couldn't find/stop the running process.

Any ideas on this will be appreciated, including possible some more information on how to manage built-in background processes on Android. Anything, really, I don't care if it envolves turning to ADB or running commands from Terminal Emulator.

Thank you everyone!

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  • Is google music installed in your phone?
    – samnaction
    Apr 3, 2014 at 5:30
  • Another cause of this (From my experience) is hitting the home button with a game running (not exiting correctly) and then leaving it or dismissing the app from the 'Recent Applications' screen. Rayman is a devil for this, it will consume battery non stop under the 'media server'.
    – RossC
    Apr 4, 2014 at 11:35
  • @sameer: Yes, it is
    – Marc.2377
    Apr 18, 2014 at 5:45
  • @Marc.2377 for few uninstalling google music solved the problem but it may be also due to corrupt file
    – samnaction
    Apr 18, 2014 at 5:51
  • @sameer I doubt it is due to any corrupt files because it happens even from a fresh ROM flashing, like if the phone is brand new. I tried different ROM files and versions as well. Thanks for the tip on Google Music, I'd try that but I kind of gave up on this already.
    – Marc.2377
    Apr 19, 2014 at 22:41

5 Answers 5

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It could be that it's not a particular file that's corrupt, but the filesystem itself. I've had a similar problem on a Galaxy S3, and the culprit was a filesystem error on the SD card. Removing the SD card and scanning the filesystem for errors from a computer fixed the problem.

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  • This must be the answer I guess, however I didn't have a chance to scan it for errors before the phone crashed.
    – Marc.2377
    Nov 29, 2015 at 12:46
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The media server application indexes all your media on the phone. Its common that if you transfer media files to your phone that the power consumption of the media server will go up but only for a short period of time. This is necessary, otherwise app's won't be able to find your newly imported media.

But in your case, since you seem to be having troubles with the media server app constantly consuming battery. I think that you may have a/or several corrupt media files in the phone or on your SD card. Causing the media server app to constantly trying to index files.

Just to do a quick test, try to copy all your important media and other files to your computer then delete them from your phone or do a format on your storage memories and check if you still experience this.

If you don't, the problem is as I suspected a broken or corrupt media file. The hard part is to figure out which one.

Source: http://talk.sonymobile.com/

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Try to FORCE STOP applications that use your camera such as snapchat and skype. I did and it worked. Good luck!

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I have the same problem. (Xperia running 4.4.4) It happened to me when I plugged my phone in to my car USB (ironically to charge the battery). The car system must request a list of media for it to play (I hope it is clever and doesn't ask for photo's too.) From then on my phone started to heat up and my battery started discharging rapidly. This went on for a few hours, long after I had disconnected the phone from the car. Even turning the phone off and restarting it did not clear it. In the end I just looked for running apps, found two processes being run by media. I closed these and the drain stopped. I reckon what is happening is that media keeps trying to handshake with the USB port (or something like that). Some sort of bug in the program keeps it looping when it should close.

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  • I bet one of those apps was PowerAmp? I just cannot find the answer currently, but that app seems to have a setting to always trigger the media scanner. Switching that off should cure the issue.
    – Izzy ♦
    Dec 20, 2014 at 14:23
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I had the same problem on my Samsung Galaxy S5. I deleted LOST.dir and the Android map from my SD card, and it fixed the problem.

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