Help Unplayable media files

[jvoegele]

I'm having a sporadic but frequent problem with my Epic, wherein media files (on the SD card) suddenly become unplayable. Specifically, podcasts in Dogg Catcher, and audio books in MortPlayer, Ambling Book Player, and Audible will suddenly stop working and the app will report some sort of error such as "media file not playable" or some such.

This happens approximately once per day at unpredictable times, and my original response was to reboot the phone, which did fix the problem temporarily. Now I've discovered that unmounting the SD card, then remounting it and allowing the Android media scanner to complete will also temporarily fix the problem. In either case, however, the problem returns within a day or two, maximum.

Has anyone else experienced this kind of problem, or have any advice on how I might go about fixing them?

(FYI, my phone is rooted and I am running Syndicate Frozen 1.1 ROM, but this problem was happening before the root procedure back when I was running stock, and persists even after moving to Syndicate.)

Thanks!

 

[g33kdad]

It's unfortunate nobody replied to you, because I am having the exact same issue as you. I was convinced it was SD card data, too. Once or twice a day, my custom ringtones I have stored on my SD card would stop working. Sure enough, if I tried to play those MP3 ringtones on the Music Player, I would get "Music Player does not support this type of file" or some such error. A phone reboot or SD card remount would fix the problem until the next day or so.

Now, I've only had this phone for about 3 weeks now so I'm still running stock firmware... haven't gotten up the nerve to root it yet. I did early on get a "SD card corrupted" message asking to format the card, but a reboot fixed that problem too. This past weekend I was hoping maybe formatting the card would fix the problem, but the issue persists.

However, I just experienced this issue moments ago... when trying to view a YouTube video. After a power cycle, I'm able to view the YouTube video without an issue. Are we sure it is SD card related? Could it be something else? Do YouTube videos get cached to the SD card before they play? That might explain it...

Did you get an answer elsewhere? Does anyone know what's going on here? Is my phone physically bad or is this a common software issue?

 

[jaywdee]

I believe it's a software issue... there are more of us with the same issue... I've done the powercycle, hard reset and issue still there... my next step is to root and install cusom rom... a friend who works on mobile apps suggested it might be a codec issue or a driver issue...??? Still looking into those suggestions

 

[AbuNaeemah]

Hello. I just want it to be on the record that I'm having this problem as well. It started about a month or two ago, I don't really remember. It must be after I upgraded to 2.2. It's ridiculous that I have to power off my phone and power it on again about once every day or two. The problem does not allow me to play: voicemail messages from the voicemail app, audio files, video files, voice recorded files. It doesn't even let me record messages on the Voice Recorder app.

 

[Stevedtat]

I can tell you what fixed the media file problem on my sd card. If you're running 4.1 and below, android does not format sd cards very reliably. After numerous attempts, i just couldn't get it to fix the problem. Finally, i said the heck with it and had windows format it fat32. I was able to reclaim some space that id lost partitioning the drive also. And never had the problem since...that was 594 days ago and 3 phones ago. Once in awhile i take my sd card and let windows run a chkdsk on it. And its just as good as the day i bought it.