asus T100 GPS and battery life?

[wildpig1234]

updated to 207 bios. slightly better battery usage of 5.5 min of mp4 movie/1% (182 min uses 33%). so i can watch 8.25 hr of movie using 90% of batt theoretically... this is with keyboard dock and streaming movie from emmc with lowest setting of brightness. does this sound about right for everyone?

[rickscheller]

What video player did you use. There are some older posts here under apps about battery frugal video players and as I recall some users did some testing and I believe VLC was one of, if not the best, player for reduced battery drain.

[azazel1024]

So i got a t100taf-b12-gr at office depot. it does have a broadcom gnss and worked fine with centrafuse localizer.

Battery life is a little disappointing. design capacity appears to be only 30,225 per energy report. Played 3hr movie and used 48% battery so it will barely last 6hr of movie playing on battery and that's at the dimmest screen brightness.

I did have the T100 on keyboard dock the whole time. but the movie were played from the asus ssd, not from a usb drive. Maybe i ll try playing movie without keyboard dock and see if it's any better.

My asus x205 i got from bf for $100 is still the best battery life. 3hr movie only uses 25% battery.

Ouch. That is pretty horrible. A 3hr movie on mine at 40% screen brightness and 80% volume generally chews about 20% of battery life (about 15% if I use it with HDMI to a TV and screen off). Has a ~35whr capacity to the ~30whr capacity that your's is reporting, but there isn't that much difference there. I wonder what else, component selection wise, might be different that is resulting in that. Maybe crappier eMMC storage and/or regular RAM instead of low voltage RAM or something?

PS That is undocked, docked might see an extra 1% or so battery life chewed for a 3hr movie. Unless you have a HDD dock, the regular dock doesn't use much extra power.

[azazel1024]

What video player did you use. There are some older posts here under apps about battery frugal video players and as I recall some users did some testing and I believe VLC was one of, if not the best, player for reduced battery drain.

No, the "built in" Windows movie player under the touch UI is the best. Regular desktop windows media player is number 2. VLC is fairly far back, though there are worse.

Things may have changed over the last 9 months or so, but Anandtech did a test of a number of them back in vaguely spring of this year (might have been winter) that found that on a given laptop, they could get something like 8hrs with the Windows media player, a few minutes less with the desktop version and VLC dropped it to around 7hrs and another one dropped it to like 6hrs.

[wildpig1234]

Ouch. That is pretty horrible. A 3hr movie on mine at 40% screen brightness and 80% volume generally chews about 20% of battery life (about 15% if I use it with HDMI to a TV and screen off). Has a ~35whr capacity to the ~30whr capacity that your's is reporting, but there isn't that much difference there. I wonder what else, component selection wise, might be different that is resulting in that. Maybe crappier eMMC storage and/or regular RAM instead of low voltage RAM or something?

PS That is undocked, docked might see an extra 1% or so battery life chewed for a 3hr movie. Unless you have a HDD dock, the regular dock doesn't use much extra power.

so you use the touch ui media player? maybe i ll try that. I use mpc-hc. it does have video h/w acceleration. upgraded to the latest 307 bios for t100taf and uses 33% batt for a 3 hr movie at minimum brightness with keyboard dock.... better but not anywhere close to your device...

even the asus x205 i got for bf with a 43Whr battery would use 25% for the same 3hr movie with min brightness and mpc-hc...

btw, i got the best buy unbranded brand tablet with kb for $200. that only has a 23whr batt and it use 50% batt for the same 3 hr movie... think i am gonna return it..

[rickscheller]

Here's the thread I was thinking about... Which video player to use for .mkv x264 files with lowest battery drain? although it refers to playing .mkv x264 files rather than mp4.

Seems there was no real consensus but the info there may be helpful.

[wildpig1234]

kinda split between k-lite and mpc-hc. I tried using touch ui but it doesn't play mkv files.... seems to me the expectation is around 10-11% batt/hr video playing with HW acceleration.... so my usage of 33% for a 182 min video is probably on the ballpark. I was hoping for a definite 10-11 hr of video but there's only so much I guess the smaller battery in t100 can do compared to a bigger battery in x205. plus x205 screen probably use less power anyway since it's not a touch screen..... Gonna test this out a few more days but I think I will end up keeping the t100 and return the best buy unbranded tablet since the best buy one can only do about 5 to 5.5 hr of video....

[wildpig1234]

Connected standby battery drain in my t100taf: 8% batt for 12 hr. a little excessive? maybe due to the kb dock also sucking up some power? maybe i'll disconnect kb dock and see if i'ts any better...

I am more used to 0.5%/hr on my Samsung 500t. even the best buy unbranded tablet is about 0.5%/hr.... however these are without kb dock. on my Samsung 500t with kb dock the rate is closer to 1% but I think Samsung didn't correctly implement slp with the dock.

what you think?

[azazel1024]

Connected standby battery drain in my t100taf: 8% batt for 12 hr. a little excessive? maybe due to the kb dock also sucking up some power? maybe i'll disconnect kb dock and see if i'ts any better...

I am more used to 0.5%/hr on my Samsung 500t. even the best buy unbranded tablet is about 0.5%/hr.... however these are without kb dock. on my Samsung 500t with kb dock the rate is closer to 1% but I think Samsung didn't correctly implement slp with the dock.

what you think?

Docked, no, that isn't terribly excessive. Undocked, yes, it would be. The dock uses a bit of extra juice even in connected standby (for things like wake on key press).

My experience is roughly 5-6% per day undocked and more like 10-12% per day when docked. Since you'd seems to have roughly 86% the battery capacity of mine (~30whr versus 35whr), 8% per 12hrs doesn't seem too far out of the ballpark.

mkv support is why I never transcode my stuff to mkv, only mp4...and also why if I ever run across an mkv, I re-transcode it to an mp4 instead. Not simply because of the touch UI windows media player, but also for things like my iPhone, etc.

[wildpig1234]

yep, it is def better w.o kb dock....