Battery drain while casting

Plex Players Mobile Devices
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1

Server Version#: 1.18.6.2368-97add474d
Player Version#: 7.29.2.16071 (71e4f554)
Device: OnePlus A3003 / OxygenOS 9.0.6

When casting Plex to a Chromecast, my phone goes through a lot of battery. Android warns me of high usage and invites me to force stop Plex. Watching a 45-minute TV show this evening seemed to use 12-14% of battery.

My understanding is that the phone isn’t processing video at all, and is just sending instructions to the Chromecast. Is it burning through battery keeping the progress bar updated? (If so, it’s wasting its time as half the time I find Plex has disconnected from the Chromecast and has to reconnect before it can show anything or control the video.)

Is this a known problem? I’ve seen older topics but they’ve been closed and seem to be concerned with playback on the device itself, not casting.

2

I haven’t seen this issue. Are you sure you were casting from your server and not something that was synced to the device?

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Yes, I’m certain. There’s nothing synced with my device. So unless Plex is doing that in the background (somehow routing the cast through my phone?) without my knowledge, as far as I can tell I’m just directing the Chromecast to play from the server.

Are there particular logs that might be helpful here?

4

We can check the log from the mobile app to see what it’s doing. Start casting something and let it play through then get the log. Hopefully it should cover the entire period and we can see what happened.

5

I cast through Plex last night, then went to Settings / Help & Support / Share debugging data and have a zip file of logs – how should I send them? (I don’t know if I should be posting them publicly.) However I failed to note how much the battery decreased during that time, so maybe this isn’t helpful! If it isn’t, I’ll grab the logs again after the next time I use it (expected to be in the next few days). Thanks in advance for the help.

6

You can PM the logs to me if you don’t want to share publicly.

7

Got the logs. I’m reviewing them. Will let you know when I find something.

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Server Version#: 1.18.9.2571
Player Version#: 7.30.0.16390
Device: Samsung Note 9 (Android 10)

Exactly the same issue here, doing the same operation (casting to a Chromecast) inside a 192.168.x.x LAN scenario.
Battery drain is almost identical (today it was 6-7% of battery for a 20 min. series episode… keeping the smartphone screen off, obviously)

If I try to use a different Android app (not Plex) to cast (from same Plex server, to same Chromecast), battery use is 1 or 2% for a 42 min. series episode).

So, I don’t know if it’s a Plex app configuration matter or what.
I’ve yet tried to disable announce, disable “advertise as player” et cetera… and Plex app is not configured to access local media on smartphone.
It seems that Plex app is doing something it shouldn’t do, but I don’t know what.

I also noticed that Plex app starts some media using “2mps - 720p” quality, even if it’s a LAN scenario, so I have to manually change it to original (maximum) when it starts playing.

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Got the logs. I’m reviewing them. Will let you know when I find something.

Thanks. I’ve just sent you some more logs which might be better as Plex was still alive at the end of it (before I killed it having taken the logs).

10

Same here. Complete battery drain on samsung s8. Phone is close to unusable when casting

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