Whats the best media player for battery life? (N810)
 

Hello there. I have another question. What would be the best Media player for battery life? I've been reading and appearently the media player uses a lot of CPU so it drains the battery life. Is there any media players that use less CPU to make the battery life "better"? Thanks!!

VV

Re: Whats the best media player for battery life? (N810)
 

Anything that uses the DSP rather than ARM may help, especially if the CPU is being used otherwise. I'm not sure anyone's done experiments to resolve it exactly, but the difference should be negligible if the decoding is the main workload, as both CPU and ARM will be clocking (for similar time either way) while only one of them is doing decoding.

Of course, not killing cycles rendering junk to the screen is good too, so like any app, it should pay attention to when the screen is off and not keep drawing invisible updates; not sure which ones do this, but ssh and top should make it pretty easy to check. Not drawing stuff even when the screen's on helps too, and you can't beat having no front-end running, so mpd obviously leads by this measure, though it does use libmad for decoding.

Re: Whats the best media player for battery life? (N810)
 

I think DSP vs CPU for better battery life is mostly a myth. Both are processors, and both need power. The advantage of using the DSP is for better performance without putting heavy load on the CPU.
A good codec and good mediaplayers don't put heavy load on the CPU and DSP. This helps saving battery best. The screen is the biggest battery drainer of course.

Re: Whats the best media player for battery life? (N810)
 

I haven't taken any real hard measurements (with amperimeter or chronometer), but the power applet says that using the dsp saves 10-20% of power.

Re: Whats the best media player for battery life? (N810)
 

DSP should be able to do the same work with fewer cycles and therefore use less power, however as the ARM cpufreq frequency is pegged when the DSP is running, it may be less efficient to use the DSP when there's nothing else to be done on the ARM. Anyone happen to know the power consumption of the ARM1136 with very low load but a fixed cpufreq?

Nokia should know the answer, I wonder if it's old enough for them to release a hint to us?