Power Consumption of Video-Decoders on Various Android Devices

TL;DR

This paper presents a software-based system to estimate and analyze the power consumption of various video decoders on a large set of Android devices, providing valuable data for optimizing battery life during video playback.

Contribution

It introduces an automatic measurement system and a comprehensive dataset of power consumption and decoding speed for six video standards across 285 Android devices.

Findings

Power consumption varies little between devices of the same model.

No clear dependence of power use on battery level was observed.

The dataset highlights the most and least efficient video decoders and devices.

Abstract

The critical constraint of mobile devices is a limited battery life that is significantly reduced during video playback. The power efficiency of video playback mainly depends on the used compression standard, video-decoder, and device model. We propose a software-based method to estimate the power consumption of video-decoders on various Android devices. Experiments on two devices of the same model show a small variation of the power playback consumption and a lack of dependence between the power consumption and the battery level. We have implemented an automatic system that includes the VEQE Android application to measure the power consumption of decoders and a server to collect the power metrics. Our system has collected power-consumption and decoding-speed dataset for video-decoders of six standards (AV1, HEVC, VP9, H.264, VP8, and MPEG-4) operating on 285 devices, representing 147 models. We demonstrate some slices of the created dataset: the top 30 models and video-decoders in terms of power efficiency for playback and for decoding only, as well as video-decoder ratings by power consumption and decoding speed for a given device model.