While I was writing a shell script (doing this the past several days) just a few minutes ago my PC fans spinned up without any seemingly reason. I thought it might be the baloo process, but looking at the running processes I see it’s names block-rate-estim . It takes 6.2% CPU time and is running since minutes, on my modern 8 core CPU. And uses up 252 KiB. The command is shown as block-rate-estim --help, which when I run on the commandline myself will just run the program without output and blocking until I end the process. Sounds alarming to me first. Is something mining going on?
I looked up where the command is coming from:
$ ls -l /usr/bin/block-rate-estim
.rwxr-xr-x 14k root 20 Dez 2023 /usr/bin/block-rate-estim
$ yay -F block-rate-estim
extra/libde265 1.0.12-1 [installed: 1.0.15-1]
usr/bin/block-rate-estim
$ yay -Si libde265
Repository : extra
Name : libde265
Version : 1.0.15-1
Description : Open h.265 video codec implementation
Architecture : x86_64
URL : https://github.com/strukturag/libde265
Licenses : LGPL3
Groups : None
Provides : None
Depends On : gcc-libs glibc
Optional Deps : ffmpeg: for sherlock265
qt5-base: for sherlock265
sdl: dec265 YUV overlay output
Conflicts With : None
Replaces : None
Download Size : 270,31 KiB
Installed Size : 783,53 KiB
Packager : Antonio Rojas
Build Date : Mi 20 Dez 2023 20:06:16 CET
Validated By : MD5 Sum SHA-256 Sum Signature
It’s still going on the background, I have no idea what this is. The thing is, I didn’t start any process that is related to video codec. Other than FreeTube being in the background with video in Pause mode since 2 hours or so. I use FreeTube since months and this never happened before, I see this block-rate-estim process the first time.
What should I do? I’m on an up-to-date EndeavourOS installation.
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block rate estim is part of the libde265 package, a library for decoding h265 video.
i haven’t dealt with video decoding in a while but it looks like your paused video (encoded in space-saving h265, natch!) is what this library is being called for.
pstree would be a good start, but i’d bet it would just lead back to the browser you were watching the video in.
e: pstree is what i meant to say, fixed. pstree.x11 too!
Good to know its actually a part of the package and not something that is compromised. The strange thing is, this never happened before and I am using FreeTube for half a year or so. And the program started running after 1 or so pause (i don’t know how long, maybe half hour maybe 2 hours) of the video, so not sure what this might be doing. I forgot that the app was on a different virtual desktop, while I was editing a text file (Bash script). That’s why I got a little bit nervous.
BTW it wasn’t a browser, its FreeTube, a dedicated application to watch YouTube videos. When I think about, just since today morning FreeTube acted not normal, always taking long time to start. Which is resolved now. So you might be right that this is the connection. I will watch an eye on it and if this happens again, I will reply here (if I don’t forget) and make an issue on the issue tracker for this app. Thank you for the explanation. Right now there is nothing else to do for me.
