media player - Unsupported File Type: Why did my Samsung Galaxy S suddenly stop supporting MP3s?

All of a sudden my Samsung Galaxy S claims to not support mp3 files (the phone has been idle for a few hours, I did not touch anything). Ogg files however still play without problems. When this happens, no app can play mp3 files, e.g. my custom ring tone is not played anymore (it just vibrates as if it were muted). A reboot of the phone fixes the issue but within 3-4 days the problem comes back. It does not make a difference if files are stored on internal or external sd card.

This also affects video playback, I'm just not sure if it happens at the same time or independent of each other. The youtube app can no longer start videos (unknown playback problem), and the video player app claims all video files as unsupported. I suppose the issue may not be the video playback itself but the audio codec used in the video (mp3).

Any idea how to fix this or debug this? I don't want to reboot my phone every couple of days - it takes 2-3 minutes to do this and a phone should just work.

I applied 2.2.1 firmware lately and this only seemed to make the problem worse. I had this before 2.2.1 (with 2.2) but only very rarely.

I'm curious if TitaniumBackup may be the culprit as the backup scheduler seems to stop processes sometimes. Maybe others experiencing this issue use scheduled TitaniumBackups, too? The hint was that since upgrading to 2.2.1 I also upgraded to the licensed TitaniumBackup version and scheduled daily backups. But this may just be coincidence. What contradicts this theory: Backups are scheduled at night but last time I saw this issue it happened during the day - mp3 worked in the morning, failed in the afternoon. The phone was idle during the time it "decided" to no longer play mp3.

Looking at forums (I only found a few hits in Google), people having the same problems suggest to simply reboot the phone - but that is no fix at all. Or they suggest to send the phone back for replacement - and guess what: It has not fixed the problem for people experiencing this issue. So I suggest it is not a hardware issue (neither related to sdcards nor to the phone itself).

Answer

I think I found the problem.

Like bjoernz said, some application is creating many objects from MediaPlayer class and it's not releasing that after. So, I opened an adb shell, became root (su) and I found the PID (process ID) of mediaserver, using the command:

ps | grep mediaserver

The mediaserver's PID, in my case, is: 84

Then, I listed all resources used by that PID with the command:

lsof | grep 84

And I got the following result:

So, it became easy to identify that the official twitter application (com.twitter.android-1.apk) was the problem. Then I removed twitter application and I installed TweetDeck instead and the problem disappeared since last week.

Hope this can help you.

[]'s