Ubuntu Phone Can Get Toasty & Battery Hungry With Browser Video Playback

Written by Michael Larabel in Ubuntu on 21 August 2015 at 03:09 PM EDT. 6 Comments
UBUNTU
Particularly if watching any videos from the web browser with an Ubuntu Phone or using WiFi, your phone's battery can drain quite quickly while the device gets rather warm.

One of the newest discussions on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list is about overheating. The Ubuntu Phone user that started the thread warned, "my Nexus 4 (most recent stable version) gave me a burn that almost blistered after 15 minutes of YouTube (wifi), and went from 29% battery to 2% in that time."

Apparently one of the primary reasons for this is that while there is hardware codec / accelerated video playback support implemented in Ubuntu Phone, it's not yet handled by Ubuntu's web-browser. Thus when playing videos from the web browser, it gobbles up the CPU -- thus greater power consumption and excess heat rather than using the more efficient video hardware. Canonical developers are still working out the accelerated video playback support for their phone's web browser.

Ubuntu Phone also doesn't yet have hardware overlay support, but that's reported to be in the works for around the Mir 0.16~0.17 time-frame. Mir 0.16 is the version currently under development.

Another user added on the overheating thread, "I’ve noticed it as well, Wifi is a really battery drainer. With 3G I can get 2 days at least, but only one day with wifi on."

More details via this thread.


Given I haven't run any Ubuntu Phone/Nexus benchmarks since its very early days, I've thought about re-setting up a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 with the latest builds, but I think I'll hold off until they end up re-basing to Ubuntu 15.10 or 16.04 LTS in hopes of more progress. If you have any other interesting test suggestions, as always, feel free to chime in via the forums or on Twitter or Facebook. If you are an Ubuntu Phone user we'd love to hear your feedback too via those mediums.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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