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.
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.
Freetube won’t have anything to do with h265 as youtube does not serve that format in any way.